


Madonna of the Balcony

by QuizzicalQuinnia



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-25
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-08-17 07:57:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 41,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8136329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuizzicalQuinnia/pseuds/QuizzicalQuinnia
Summary: Jaime Lannister hides away at an isolated Sothoryos resort, mired in the loss of his identity as a sculptor after a devastating injury. Fate is cruel and allows his muse to be found only after he can no longer capture her form, but perhaps she's there for another purpose entirely.





	1. Man Paints with His Mind and Not with His Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Happy J/B Week One and All!!!!
> 
> As usual (pretty much always!), huge thanks to Mikki for beta-ing and cheerleading this fic as it's struggled to form itself. Couldn't write a word without your snark!
> 
> This fic is weird. It's esoteric and wordy, and frequently mental. I sort of love it's weirdness, and I hope you all enjoy it a little :-)
> 
> Each chapter title is a quote by Michelangelo for reason that will become quickly apparent. Really, this whole thing could be titled "Ode to Brienne's Body" and that would be accurate.

A salt wind ambled over the sea and inland, sifting beige sand that would be beautifully complex with spiraling shapes of every color if seen under glass. The salt would cling to his fingers if he held them out, just enough to make them feel a little chalky if he rubbed them together. All five of them, not ten.

He kept them pressed lightly against the padded arm of the outdoor chaise and continued to peer at the small ocean waves and the birds swooping in and out with prizes or disappointment.

“Mr. Lannister?” a thickly-accented voice floated over Jaime’s shoulder. It sounded like a Lyseni had spent too much time in Dorne, like _Meeser Lannither_.

Jaime felt his jaw clenching tightly at the interruption. He had been considering how to go about sculpting waves, what type of stone would best reveal the luminous strata of flowing water. He’d forgotten he’d ordered a drink some time ago.

“Mr. Lannister?” the voice repeated.

Jaime sighed. “Yes?”

A perfectly-balanced tray appeared next to his right shoulder, a five-fingered tanned hand sliding a tumbler of rum onto a small reed table. Jaime reached for a bill tucked into his shirt pocket.

The waiter’s hand returned to the tray. “This also came for you, Mr. Lannister.”

A crimson envelope began to encroach onto the table.

“No, hand it to me.” Jaime didn’t look at the envelope or the waiter. “Please.”

“Of course, Mr. Lannister.”

The envelope was exchanged for the bill in Jaime’s outstretched hand. It was an awkward motion, reaching his left arm across his body, but he wasn’t about to display his ruined limb.

“Thank you, Mr. Lannister.”

And the voice was no more. Jaime had wondered how many times the waiter could say his name in the span of a few minutes. It made him feel old. It made him feel like his father.

He stuffed the envelope into his pocket, purposely wrinkling the smooth surface. It was quality stationery and sturdy. Hard to damage. He expected nothing less. It looked the same as the dozen that had come before, crisp and perfect crimson bait for which he would never again fall.

He didn’t want to think about the envelope or what it contained, and particularly not about its sender. He wanted to think about marble and limestone. A blue Volantene slab could do well for a seascape. There was that quarry twenty or so minutes outside Volantis, family-owned artisans in their own right. What was the man’s name…Mott. Jaime could get a good deal on a slab from Mott. He’d done it many times before.

He thought about his next batch of students, how many of the twenty bright-eyed young things would have a set of deft fingers. How many would see inside stone with their minds, and how many would blankly stare as he spoke of sculpture’s soul. Of twenty…two would have promise. Maybe. Six would be dismissed early on. The other twelve would muddle through, half moving on to unrelated things like accounting, and half earning their livings by making pedestals for ferns and miniatures of landmarks for tourists. He’d met them all just before the term break. He knew which two he would keep after.

He considered how to teach the carving of waves. He wondered if one of those two new promising minds might be appreciative of a thick blue slab. Neither, not this round. No one in his current group could handle sea waves. They had no true grace in their fingers. They could not dance their chisels across stone like a lover’s caress.

If he had ever carved waves, they would have been beautiful. Dark and forbidding at the bottom, then lighter and lighter still as the sun’s hope warmed them until they turned to pure white froth and floated away.

He wouldn’t look at his ruined hand. He tucked it into the pocket of his long shorts, out of sight, never out of mind.

The sea had become oppressive.

He rose from the chaise and reached for the rum, carrying it with him through the maze of beach chairs and cabanas toward the shockingly cheap Sothoryos hotel. This place would have cost ten times as much in the Summer Isles. More than that on the Dornish coast. Everyone was so eager to please inside, always helping with doors and buttons, and he just wanted to hide and think and drink rum. His brother would be proud.

His gaze flickered to the top floor as he moved. The shade had been lowered by the maid. His suite was the best the hotel had to offer, of course, and his balcony the largest. All the balconies had those retractable shades and were surrounded by railings forming posh cages. They were staggered, too, so no one could see the inhabitants of each room on the floors below. Just their lower halves, really, if they were close enough to the rails. He’d taken to walking slowly from the beach, so he could watch strangers lingering on their own balconies. See if anyone had an interesting shape.

Jaime saw nothing and no one up there, and forced himself to smile as he entered the hotel. The lift button was pressed by the bellboy whose tanned skin had a striking golden undertone. Something from Mott’s quarry for this boy, a bronze-tinted slab and overlays of alabaster for the white teeth. It would be simple to find this boy’s stone twin somewhere in a quarry.

Jaime listened to the voices sucking up the humid air, several coming from the front desk around the corner from the lifts. He recognized the calm, rote tones of the check-in clerk, and there was another voice, deeper and quieter. It was a woman, clearly, and Jaime immediately started giving her shape in his head.

Her voice was hesitant, as if she were uncertain whether her request to check-in was acceptable. There was a depth of confidence there, too. She was good at some things and knew it, but they weren’t the sort of things useful to a person checking into a hotel. She would be average, he thought. Possibly a bank teller or an accountant who wanted a nice holiday but couldn’t afford one of the better-known locations.

She would stand no higher than his breastbone. She would be thin with a few extra pounds around her hips that would make her self-conscious in a bikini. She would be tanned, probably fake out of a bottle, with medium brown hair in sepia, and brown eyes in dusty mahogony. There would be nothing remarkable about her. She could come alive in a slab of Qarthian stone, but she wouldn’t recognize herself in sculpture form, because no one ever did.

The lift doors slid open, and the bellboy hopped inside the car to press buttons. The boy already knew which floor. Jaime dismissed the new guest from his mind.

He had thought Sothoryos would have no idea who he was. There were only three resorts in Zamettar at all, long stretches of unspoiled beach on one side, dense green jungle on the other. It had taken three planes to get there. If he were to buy slabs of stone at the quarry in Yeen, transport would be a real problem.

He hadn’t been to that quarry before. He couldn’t imagine who _had_. It was over an hour from the coast, and the jungle wasn’t exactly hospitable. Still, a new quarry, small and in the middle of nowhere, was too much to resist. The other master sculptors in Westeros would not yet have scavenged it clean. Jaime doubted even the Braavosi or the artisans around Liberty Bay would have had the chance either. It was all his for once, not likely to be ripped away like everything else in his life.

The elevator _dinged_ , and the doors slid open. Jaime passed a bill to the bellhop and walked briskly to his suite. He had to set his rum on the plush carpet in order to pass the keycard over the sensor, and then brace the heavy door with his shoulder while he bent to retrieve the drink. He should have asked the bellhop to carry it in for him and risk a reputation of entitled first-world overlord.

The door swung shut, latched, and sealed him in silent sanctuary. Sheer curtains flitted about as the wind, turned soft breeze at this distance, floated in from the open doors to the balcony. He should have left the screen shut at least. A lizard of some kind was enjoying the view as it lounged on his small dining table. It rolled its great wide eyes up at Jaime as he passed by. Jaime decided to call it Mace, chuckling to himself.

He moved onto his balcony and settled into a chair almost identical to the one on the beach. Jaime had spent his first two days in Zamettar on that balcony, entirely naked and almost hoping to scandalize anyone looking up the rooms the way he liked to do. No one had seen, or no one had cared. He was invisible there in his room. Maybe he would stay longer than the two-week term break. Maybe he would take a sabbatical.

He sipped rum and let his head fall against the back of the chair as the breeze slid through his hair like a woman’s fingers. The woman inhabiting his daydreams once had a face but did no longer.

More rum, and he took the crimson envelope from his pocket to place it in the ashtray on the table next to him. He flicked the lighter he kept next to the tray, and the envelope blazed then quickly fizzled into a pile of blood-colored ash. He smiled as it crumbled like the others that had been sent.

 

* * *

 

Jaime woke so abruptly that his teeth clacked together from the jerking motion of his neck. He reached up to rub sore muscles, his blinking eyes settling on the absence of fingers as he unclenched his jaw. His stump was a terrible masseur. He spotted a remnant of rum in the tumbler and reached for it with his good hand. He sipped and studied what he saw all around, dusk light in pink and orange creating a different palette than mid-day sun’s glare.

The beach was nearly deserted. Dinner hour, he thought. The tide was coming in, turning the beige sand into a damp landscape of milky, ashy chocolate. He stood and moved to the railing, the smooth, wide edge a perfect rest for his forearms. To the left and down, there was a pair of filthy feet attached to hairy legs crossed at the ankle. They bobbed about as if dancing to music only they could hear.

Jaime moved to the right. No one had been in that room yet. He could only see a little bit of that balcony, just a little past the railing from his vantage point above. He heard a door sliding open. He knew someone was there, in the shadow caused by the shade, and he waited in excitement. This was all his days held now, waiting to see something new, deciphering how to describe it to his students, hoping one of them would have the skill to bring it to life in stone. Knowing they wouldn’t. His creations and their beauty existed only in his mind where they would die unseen.

The person moved forward. The posture relaxed as the man rested his arms on the ledge just as Jaime himself was doing. This man was extremely tall, his legs encased in loose, moss-green cargo trousers tucked into the tops of heavy hiking boots, and he seemed to be wearing a too-large jacket, the band at the waist gaping away from the body and hiding the muscles of the arms. Jaime chuckled a little. The man seemed more ready for a trek through the Red Wastes rather than a stay at a beach resort, but perhaps he was there for the jungle and not the sea.

Jaime waited for movement. When it came, it was slight but controlled, shifts of gravity and mass. The legs were muscled. He saw them clearly up to the thigh before they were cast in the shade’s shadow. They belonged to an athlete, he thought, someone with discipline and regimen. Someone in control of their body. A rower, perhaps. Yes, this was a man who was a professional rower and adventurer. He would be taller than Jaime and probably better built, though Jaime had no illusions about his own strength and tone. At least he still had that.

The adventurer would be have an unusual blend of features, maybe mixed race like a Dothraki-Northerner. He would have the dark eyes and build of the Dothraki, with lashes so thick they would appear to have built-in kohl. The man would have been mocked for it until he grew big and beautiful. He would have the lighter hair of the Northerner though, and the lithe movements of a skier. Jaime would have to find this man in the hotel. The muscles along his neck could be curious.

The man began to retreat back into his room, slowly but with careful control of movement. A slight pivot on a heel, a twist at the waist which was nearly obscured at this angle. A shift in the center of gravity that was held within the pelvis, smooth and defined as the right thigh tensed and pushed forward to carry the body into the room. The balcony door slid shut. Jaime heard its click. He sucked in a breath.

He stepped back into the protection of his own room, angry and captivated by his failure to _see_. Was he losing that, too? He never had before. It was his sight, his mind that allowed him to see, not his hand. But he had not immediately known that those long, muscled limbs belonged to a woman. He was fascinated he had not _known_.

It was so obvious now, as he replayed the images of her movements inside his head. The center of motion in her pelvis and not her abdomen had given her away, and he reevaluated everything else. There were differences to a trained eye. Clues to the pattern of a body. She was big and, he was sure, heavy, but he’d be surprised if there were any fat on her. He maintained that she was an athlete, possibly still a rower. His heart rate sped as if he’d begun to jog along the beach. She had a body he’d never seen. She had limbs that he’d never found captured by artistic expression.

Jaime sighed. He would have sketched if he could. His heart slowed. Her body would float in his head only, shaping itself from graphite lines over and over so he could commit her image to memory. He called for room service. He had yet to dine in the nicely appointed restaurant or in the bar on the beach. He hated the stares he always received as he attempted to eat gracefully with one hand.

He moved back to the balcony, listening for clicks of door latches and watching the sun swim with steady, gliding strokes toward the horizon, and then dropping as a diver straight into the water where it burned and sank and melted. The purple it left behind was the exact shade of the stone he had once used to carve the face of his mother. Tywin has said she’d looked bruised and dead. Jaime had not said that was the point.

He answered the door, allowed the waiter to arrange his meal and wine on the balcony table, passed a bill, and settled in for more hours of solitude and peace and flights of imagination.

He worked through a nice soup and a salad that did not require the use of two hands. He was about to move on to some sort of rice dish with small pieces of seafood, but a shadow reappeared on the woman’s balcony. It was getting so dark now the dim and pleasant room lights changed the shapes of things, cool blue tones replaced by artificial incandescent warmth.

Jaime stayed as quiet as he could while standing and dragging the table and chair closer to the right, so he could see without leaning. There were two sets of legs now. One wore the generic khaki trousers of the resort staff, with simple brown sandals over tanned feet and sand-roughened nails. It was a man, probably the same waiter who had brought his own food. Jaime recognized the bending motion in the knees as something was set down.

The other set of legs was hers. She moved close to her balcony’s edge to make way for the waiter, and she was facing away from him. His eyes trailed higher, feeling as if he were burning her from his aerie above. She had no idea he watched. He could see higher now, the railing pressed into her buttocks. Shadows and impediments shielded all else.

Her green trousers seemed browner in the light, but they were the same, rolled up two times. Her feet were bare. No heavy boots or thick socks. They were large and well-formed, nails unpainted, no thatches of hair like the guest on the other balcony below. He could just see thin tendons flexing as she pressed her toes against the smooth concrete while she waited. Her ankles were a paradox of iron strength and delicate form. He wondered if she knew that about them, that a clear indentation around the ankles was one of the hardest things to sculpt, like a waist and a wrist.

He wanted her in skin-tight leggings, or better yet, nothing at all, so he could see the muscles and the way they snaked over her bones under her skin. How they coiled or lengthened. A block of hard rusty Westerlands marble would do. But not too red or she’d look flayed.

His rice went cold as he stared. When she sat down to eat, he could barely see her anymore, just her feet in deep shadow under her table. She seemed to finish her meal quickly and efficiently, and then she was gone. Twenty minutes later, the light in her room went off, but he could see the flickering blue glow of her television. He wondered what she watched.

Finally, he abandoned his vigil and left the food for the lizards. He showered in cold water and thought about the way a chisel would attack stone in violence, chipping away tiny shards of her disguise, but the effort would leave behind the shape of a leg smooth as silk or steel and tensed for action.

He slept naked as the television bathed his body in a harsh glare.

 

 

 


	2. Every Block of Stone has a Statue Inside It, and It Is the Task of the Sculptor to Discover It

  
Jaime missed the sunrise as he waited on the jungle side of the hotel for his driver. It was time to visit the quarry, and he felt a familiar but long-buried sense of elation at the idea of scouring raw stone and cut stone for shapes hidden inside them like living beasts. They wanted to burst out of their cages and call him master. He handed bills to the driver and climbed into the back of the air-conditioned SUV. The beasts turned into women as the green jungle flashed by, and the women all had strong ankles they would use to kick themselves out of the marble.

He would watch her again that night and hope she would still be there. He wouldn’t return to the beach.

Jaime was surprised when the SUV turned into an opening in the jungle, onto a road even dustier and narrower than the first. It had been over the hour promised by the desk clerk at the hotel, but it had seemed far shorter to him. His mind had been flooded with images of the woman’s body that he contrived to match the strength of her ankles, but he knew he fell far short. Her body would startle him. He could not envision the way her ribs would expand with breath as she swam. He could not decide how her vertebra would unfold as she rowed.

The road opened into a clearing that stretched far in his sightline, and there were haphazard structures lining either side, with more in rows behind them. This was Yeen, the only other settlement for hours all around large enough to be found on a map. The quarry would be just beyond, and the inhabitants’ living would revolve around it.

Jaime smiled to himself. It was a “new” quarry because no one in Westeros had known about it until some pop singer had come to Zamettar and proclaimed it “the thing,” and the resorts were built and people began to venture further into the jungle out of curiosity. But the quarry had been there for a thousand years, spitting out small blocks of stone the jungle dwellers would use for their homes and animal structures. He could picture a goat pen worth three thousand Dragons.

The SUV lurched over a pothole, and Jaime watched out the window as children scampered out of the way and dogs darted toward the spinning tyres in shows of false ferocity. The buildings gave way then, leaving dust-filled space between them and the quarry proper. The driver pulled into a narrow opening in a wire fence. He glanced back at Jaime and nodded.

Jaime could see the huge pit, the top a collapsed oval coated in powdered stone. It was small for a quarry, but it would hold no fewer secrets in its hidden slabs.

He unfolded himself from the vehicle and stretched. A short man came darting out from a tiny mobile office.

“Mr. Lannister?” the man called even though he was fast approaching. “You have arrived safely, yes?”

Jaime wanted to raise his brow like Tyrion did, but he refrained. “Yes, the drive was fine.”

“Gladness and joy to hear it, Mr. Lannister!” The man grinned and reached for Jaime’s hand to shake, and to his credit, he did not flinch or become cold on the sight of the uncovered stump. He merely grinned wider and motioned for Jaime to follow. “Come, come, I will guide you and find the best for you.”

Jaime allowed the enthusiastic man to lead him from place to place, hearing tall tales about the quarry’s history and beauty, but he soon explained that he needed to wander and see inside the stone by himself. The man sensed a nice sale impending and did not question, though Jaime could see a hint of amusement at the strange artist who spoke of stone as if it had a soul. Jaime knew that it did.

And Jaime had no use for the _best_ anyway. Best always meant smoothest or most uniform. The most pleasing pattern for a nice kitchen countertop or water closet floor. Pedestrian gaudiness.

Jaime wanted not what was best but what was _right_. He never looked for stone with any particular trait in mind, he just found what called to him and knew what was inside.

The damp jungle around them had begun to seep through his clothes, and all he could smell was stone dust and vegetation. He wandered the levels of the quarry, dodging workers with carts and others with equipment to force the stone from its birthplace. In Westeros, he would have been made to wear a hardhat and goggles and hideous orange vest with yellow patches on it. Here, he could do as he wished. It was beautiful, and if a slab of marble fell on him and killed him, it would be an acceptable death, in keeping with the lesser death of his hand. Perhaps he would just sink into the stone and become a caged shape within.

Tiny pebbles crunched under his boots as he walked toward an area where cut slabs were arranged along the quarry walls, waiting for inspection. He stopped in front of each. He had to allow its shape to imprint on his mind, to see if there were mysteries inside to be freed by a chisel.

Nothing in the first slab, perhaps an abstract owl or even several tourist reproductions of the statue of Baelor in the second. The third held a child from old Fleabottom, with bare feet and a mischievous grin. Jaime thought about her, but she annoyed him. She was clearly impoverished and should not be smiling, and the fact that she was seemed too disparate to be worth freeing her. He would not buy her slab.

The fourth was nothing. Or possibly it was, but Jaime did not stop there to make sure, because the fifth slab drew him to it like a magnet. It was different than the others, larger and more a full block than a slab, and had clearly come from a different wall or strata. He forced himself to stop right in front and feet away, and not approach it and stroke its surface too soon. He must take it in first.

It was the color of milk, the layer that rested just underneath the cream when you scooped it off the top. Fresh milk from a local creamery which raised its own cows, and those cows feasted on honey-scented grass thrice daily until they were fat and content and glossy. That exact shade of milk, with a barely perceptible swirl of pink deep within like veins showing through such pale skin that moonlight would turn it transparent.

He stepped close and breathed in the chalkiness of it, and he raised his stump to glide his skin along the surface. Nobody was around to jeer at him for it. The skin there, where his hand had been before and on which a different slab had carelessly fallen, or had been pushed, on it, was now more sensitive than any other part of him. Sometimes the flood of sensation was nearly unbearable, but cool stone and smooth marble were balms to its angry nature.

This slab felt like bathing in a cold river, silkstreams of crystal water flowing over him. He raised his fingers, too, and dragged them along the veins of pink. He spotted a knot halfway down, an aggregation of shades that marked where layers of stone had once crashed into each other so long ago that the scar was now a beautiful shadow. It would be her ankle bone, above her right foot. The block was just thick enough for it, for both feet and both ankles, and even a bit above. The calf, possibly. He would never free them from this cage, but his pulled his black marker from his pocket and scrawled _Lannister_ near the slab’s top edge anyway. This slab would be his no matter what.

He would not look at it longer or he would look at it all day and into the night. And there could be other slabs to free. He had to know.

He rushed recklessly back to the mobile office where the enthusiastic man was waiting.

“Are you pleased, Mr. Lannister? Would you wish to see the areas we have just opened? There are no slabs yet, but we would remove them for you--”

Jaime held his hand up. “No, no...well, possibly, but I have found a slab that does not resemble the others near it. Do you have more like that? Where did it come from?”

The man seemed to know exactly which slab Jaime meant. “Ah yes, I thought that one would be a prize! It is surely beautiful!”

Jaime rocked on his heels once, twice, and tried to quench his desire. “Are there more?” he repeated.

The man’s face fell. Jaime’s chest tightened.

“Well,” said the man, “you see, we have very few men. There is a place where the stone is raw and very ugly, and there is nothing there worth selling. Except for one block of stone. Imagine that!” The man beamed. “So ugly all around, angry stone with pits and black lines and rough like a cat’s tongue, and in this one place there was a beautiful block. We cut it out of the ugliness, but it’s large and heavy. We cannot move it more. It’s too big for our carts. So we tried to make it smaller, and it is so hard that we could only cut off that one slab you have seen. The rest remains where we removed it.” The man shrugged but was clearly disappointed that Jaime had to be interested in the one immovable slab.

Jaime didn’t hesitate. “I want to see it.” His tone was as immovable as the stone.

The man’s grin faded, replaced by wariness and perhaps a bit of mercenary hope. If the stone were a tenth as beautiful as the slab Jaime had seen, he would hand the man its weight in gold.

The man led Jaime through the quarry for the second time, but he took a turn into a narrower area closer to the jungle’s edge. The colors morphed from shadows of beige and sunset into dreary greys and mauves. Nothing could be freed from the stone around him, Jaime knew. It was empty and soulless.

They abruptly stopped in front of a particularly hideous wall, and that wall had a huge gouge in it, sinking back four or five feet. There was a structure close by, a shapeless mass covered in tarpaulin and bound at the bottom with rope.

“This is the block,” the man said as he bent to untie the rope. “It cannot be moved, and it doesn’t want to be cut,” he laughed.

The man’s rough hands dragged the garish green tarpaulin from the mass. Jaime watched it fall, slowly, slowly to the dusty ground, and he saw a jagged enigma emerge like a beast from sea.

The enormous block of marble was almost hidden from chunks of ugly surrounding stone still attached to it, scarred and puckered everywhere on the surface, but as Jaime circled it with a pounding heart, he saw one side where the slab had been freed. There, he could see inside its heart. It was like a door, a large rectangle with rough edges that marked where a limb had been wrenched away. He stepped close and peered into it, the milky swirls painting pictures of skin in his mind.

In places, there were infinitesimally small speckles of burnt orange, but rather than mar the cream, they added a new layer of intrigue. He could not tell what they were hiding, what they would they reveal to him. Oh, he knew it was her inside the stone, but he did not yet know her being. What he had seen of her, he had seen in the removed slab, and what he had yet to see he would see in this block. He knew it. He was always right about stone and skin.

He felt breathless from the elation of freeing her from this cage, and poisoned from the knowledge that he couldn’t. It almost didn’t matter. He would still buy the block and the slab, despite what they cost or how hard it would be to bring them back to Westeros. He would put them in his studio and stare at them, because he knew what they hid inside, and it would be better for them to be with him unformed than languish in a pit or become someone’s backsplash.

“How much?” he asked the man.

Eyebrows rose into the sky as the man let his jaw fall in astonishment. “You want to buy this whole block? But it cannot be moved!”

Jaime remained very calm. He was almost happy. “I don’t care. I’ll find a way. How much? And the slab, too.”

So Jaime bought the block and the slab, and several others for his pedantic students, for an obscene sum that would likely fund the quarry for more years than he had fingers. He had the money wired straight to the mobile office, and he was very forceful about his ownership. If anyone so much as breathed on his stone until he could arrange for its transport…

The man did not question and assured Jaime he would protect that immovable stone with his life. Which was worth quite a lot now.

Jaime felt a lightness in his chest as he strode back to his hired SUV. He had to tap on the window to wake the snoring driver, an ashy cigarette nearly falling from its perch between the man’s chapped lips. The man beamed as he hopped out and held the rear door open. Tipping well was always a good idea.

He settled into the welcome coolness and felt himself grinning like a madman. He had found something wonderful. It was meant solely for him and had been waiting all this time. It wouldn’t move, because he hadn’t come for it yet.

He sighed against the smooth leather seat, breathed in the mechanically circulated cool air, and decided to sleep until he arrived back at the hotel where he would camp on his balcony and wait for her to appear. If she did not, he would track her down by staring at the ankles of everyone who crossed his path.

Jaime did not wait for the bellboy to press the lift button once he had been returned to the hotel. He used the stairs to reach his room in the hotel, moving to his balcony to see if she were there. He did not expect her to be, and in this, he was correct. It was too early. She would be out traipsing the jungle or whatever she’d come to Zamettar to do. He showered to wash away the thick layer of sweat and stone dust that had formed a crust on his skin. He ordered food, and he called several of his shipping contacts to arrange for the transport of his marble. It would be very expensive. He was glad for a moment that he was a Lannister.

His meal arrived and was set on the balcony table. He ate, and waited, and watched. Night fell.

The stars had come alive in a sky so dark it was the blackest shade of blue, and the light in her room flickered on. He jumped in his seat, the rum seeping down his throat almost causing him to choke. Twenty minutes passed before her door slid open to allow the same waiter to place a tray of food identical to his own on her own identical table. She did not appear, and the waiter left, leaving the door open.

The moon was higher that night. He could see just a bit further into her space, and he leaned against his railing and waited longer.

When she stepped out, his gaze was fixed on the concrete of her balcony floor. He’d decided to introduce himself to new bits of her flesh with a certain slowness. An acclimation. So he waited for her feet and saw them, and took in her ankles and considered how the knot in the marble slab was so exactly right for her ankle bone, and hoped that she would have rolled her green trousers up three times rather than two. She hadn’t. She was not wearing those green trousers at all.

It was a hot night after a hot day. Jaime hadn’t realized quite how hot it had become, mixed with jungle damp and sea condensation. He had sweated through his shirt without noticing, but he noticed then as he shifted in his chair to ease the discomfort.

She was clearly overheated, too. Instead of clumsily rolled trouser cuffs, he saw the skin of her left calf and then her right. He’d been correct about the moonlight, how it would illuminate the milk of her skin and render it closer to his marble than he could have hoped for. The muscles there were dense and shapely, leaving that particular indentation between the bone and the meat, where he could drag his fingers down the shallow ravine and feel how the various forces that made a body move were strung together beneath glowing skin.

He swallowed and cleared his mind of chiseled images of her calves, how he would have carved them into his block. How he could have wrapped his left hand around her limb to study its exact composition. He moved his gaze higher still, to her knees where a hundred little pieces of her body came together at once, then to her thighs that offered a vast expanse of uninterrupted flesh.

There, just there, he caught a spatter of burnt orange. Speckles amid the blue light of night. He wondered if she had more that were hidden by the light, maybe everywhere, maybe a layer of color over cream. He could recall the block of marble and precisely which aspect would offer an identical spackle. It was all there, as if that marble could never become anything but a representation of her. It would never become anything, but if it had, there could be no other subject hidden inside.

He studied her until his gaze reached the hem of the long shirt she wore. It was dark, not black, perhaps a very deep blue or green, and made of a thin knit. A tee shirt. The bottom skimmed the tops of her thighs and prevented further revelation until she sat in her chair.

He thought hours had past. They must have. It was mere minutes, or possibly one. Just the time it had taken for her to move from her room and settle in her chair. His mind felt no passage of time when he studied.

He sucked in another shallow breath, feeling the lack of oxygen in his blood. He felt nervous. He felt elated. He watched.

She uncovered her meal and began to eat, but he could see only shadows of her movements. Her shirt had ridden higher when she sat. It allowed him to scan the side of her left hip now, a sliver of her left buttock. The entirety of her left leg. She flexed her foot under the table as if it were sore from her heavy boots and whatever activity she’d done. Her muscles tensed in response, and he watched them.

He heard her sigh. It was low and quiet, just for herself, and he wanted to tell her he was there, but he could not. She wouldn’t let him watch her then. No sane woman would. He knew that. He understood. His actions would be seen as predatory where they were simply the only outlet of his artistry he had left. Without his imagination, there was nothing, and such a taxed imagination required constant fuel. New images, new subjects, new puzzles of sculpture to solve.

She was not a puzzle. He knew exactly how to carve her, every part. It would not have been a challenge for him, but it would have been the best thing he’d ever done. The most beautiful. It would have had the most soul.

He thought of the loss of this piece, how the world would have been better because of it. He didn’t know how or why, he just knew. He would have been better because of it. He watched her.

She stretched her leg out under the table. It went on and on, and caused her toes to reach the front of the balcony. If he were floating out there like a bird, he would see her toes through the railing, how they flattened against the unforgiving metal and spread the pink skin just so. He was not a bird, just a man, and he stared unblinking at her leg until his neck grew stiff and his eyes dry.

She drew her legs in and rose from the chair, a fluid cinema of strength and skin. He saw the backs of those tall limbs as she turned, the delicate place behind the knee where skin was never roughened or damaged. The muscled rope of her calves stretching with her steps. The crease at the tops of her thighs.

She abandoned him, and he went inside his room and rested on his bed to calm his pulse and purge the slow-creeping fog of toxic disappointment from his mind. It was enough to form her body from marble in his imagination. It had to be.

The heat was unbearable. No other night had been like this, and he wondered why. His skin was damp, and he was uncomfortable and restless. He darted off the bed and decided to take another shower, cold and merciless.

 

 


	3. The True Work of Art is but a Shadow of the Divine Perfection

 

When Jaime woke, he was naked and tangled hopelessly in damp white sheets. He had not slept well, tossing about and ruining the pristine crisp lines of his linens. He ate breakfast on the balcony. Her door was closed. He checked the status of his marble transportation and was deeply gratified to know that the men he had hired were on their way to Sothoryos to fetch the marble from Yeen and move it to Zamettar using a heavy lift he rented from a hotel construction site nearby.

There, it would wait with him until a small cargo ship arrived. It brought supplies and took away trade goods twice a month, and he bought space on it for his prizes. They would go to Astapor where he’d load his marble on a plane and return home to Lannisport. It was all arranged. It had not been so difficult for a Lannister.

He wondered whether he should wait for her on the balcony, or search for her on foot. If she were out somewhere, he’d be unlikely to find her. He might have no choice but to wish for nightfall to arrive faster. He waited for an hour and then left his room, too restless for the silence that had begun to feel claustrophobic.

He took the stairs and stepped onto her floor. He wanted to glance around and see if there were cameras catching him, even though he wasn’t doing anything suspicious, just wandering the hotel and trying to see if she might step outside her room or return to it on happenstance.

There was no one, so he moved down to the ground floor. The lobby was deserted apart from a sleepy looking desk clerk. A bellboy waited by the lifts but was occupied by his mobile. No matter how much he might wish it, Jaime knew that she wasn’t lurking around the hotel. She wore those big boots. She would be hiking somewhere, and almost certainly inland, not the coastline.

He sighed. He hated the jungle with its impenetrable foliage and pervasive scent of rot. The insects spoiling for blood. The beasts with their silent steps following usurpers of their paths. At the front desk, the clerk forced alertness as Jaime smiled at her and asked for a bottle of water, some type of portable food, and insect spray. He had no idea where these items would come from, but his strange requests had never been refused before. It couldn’t hurt to ask.

Five minutes later, a rucksack with the hotel’s logo embroidered on it slid across the counter accompanied by a returning smile from the clerk. It was wide and too familiar. He knew that kind of smile, and he nodded his thanks and walked away before he could feel even more awkward.

He nodded at the doorman as he exited the jungle side of the hotel. He glanced inside the rucksack to find it packed with supplies, and he considered whether he should have asked after _her_ at the desk. He turned to the doorman instead.

“Have you seen a very tall woman wearing trail boots and green trousers?” Jaime tried to sound unconcerned and haphazard, as if enquiring after the location of a pancake house or mini mart.

The doorman smiled and nodded enthusiastically. “She’s out on the lake trail. She’s crazy.”

Jaime frowned, but the doorman didn’t seem to be accusatory. His thickly-accented words sounded more like an amused reflection.

“Why is she crazy?” he asked.

The doorman shrugged. “It is the jungle.”

Jaime smiled tightly. “So it is.” He turned to face the wall of tangled vines painted in juniper number seven, and slung the rucksack over his shoulder. The doorman flashed a look that projected sane derision for tourist antics.

Jaime crossed the nicely paved drive between the hotel and the jungle. It felt metaphorical, as if he were moving into something better yet still frightening, chasing the ever-elusive muse. He skirted the green edge in search of signs that would tell him the right direction, and all he found after several unmarked openings in the vine wall was a metal plaque that showed a blob with three droplets above it. He supposed that had to be an indication of the lake the doorman referenced.

He looked down at the mealy soil, and he recalled the sight of her legs, burned into his mind like a brand. He stepped onto the trail and scanned for any sign of her stride, and he smiled as he saw the imprint of a boot heel stamped quite clearly into the rot. Her mass was enough to create a pathway for him to follow. Not with every step she had taken, but here and there, a toe or a heel to guide the way as if she herself were holding a flaming torch to guide him.

It took not fifteen steps before he felt swallowed by the jungle. Damp heat, misty odors rising from the earthen floor, sounds...too many sounds. A winged thing flitted at the back of his neck. He swatted it away, and his palm had a spot of red on it after. He knew he was grimacing as he moved just a little faster and very seriously considered turning back.

He’d gone mad, at last. Tyrion had worried about that for a short while after the loss, but Jaime had fought long and hard to keep his mind competent and active. He had to sculpt _somewhere_ after all.

So it was this that had done him in. He had found his muse, cliché and startling, and he had not seen her face, and he had discovered the particular block of sweet stone that snared her image within its mass all in the same place. He should have waited on a padded beach chair with a free-flowing stream of quality alcohol to calm his too-hasty excitement.

He shook off the feeling, the worry, that he was making too much of an ankle, and plowed onward. If there had not been carved a decent path, he’d need an arakh to force his way through. He had no timepiece, and the sun rays were divided into gentle yellow tentacles pressing through the thick tree canopy.

He felt his stomach throw a small tantrum. Hunger. And his mouth was parched. He would stop in a moment, just one or two, and take care of himself.

His pupils dilated in an instant, his lungs filling with air scented by algae and a moving breeze, all at once without warning.

The sun blinded him. He raised his right arm to shield his vision but could only make out the edge of the path as it met a stretch of water, the near surface blanketed in foaming green gauze.

“Don’t move!” a voice warned, low and quiet and urgent.

He knew that voice. It belonged to the woman who had checked in the day before, the one he’d heard as he’d waited for the lift. He thought of the image he’d painted in his mind, and he laughed aloud.

“Stop!” her voice demanded. “You’ll anger it.”

He only barely understood her words. He couldn’t quite care about them. The woman who had checked in with such hesitation, and the woman who inhabited the balcony and claimed it with her long entrancing legs which had burrowed their way into his brain like a frenzied mole, were one in the same.

Another layer of his inability to _see_ her. He’d thought the woman at the desk would be unremarkable in every way, and he’d thought _she_ was a man. At first. He wanted to peel her apart, strip her bare and witness her beating heart. And he hadn’t even seen her face.

He allowed himself to look, lowering his still-raised arm inch by inch as he squinted against the glaring sun. He stood at the edge of the path which took an abrupt turn to skirt the water which seemed to be the lake from the sign. More of a very large pond, but there was clearing enough for the sun to pour itself onto the water and create a golden plate reflecting stilted shadows of the trees around the rim.

 _She_ was in the water. What he had seen of her was hidden beneath its still surface, and he smiled at that, how she was revealed to him in the reverse of the order he would have carved her from his pristine stone. Mostly. The place between the tops of her thighs and her hipbones remained a mystery, the most secret place. He always knew which students to expel when they couldn’t begin to carve a woman’s secrets without smirking.

He stood still and silent as he examined the sodden cloth of her shirt stick to her skin. He could see her navel outlined there, tantalizing under its veil. A navel was harder to get right than an ankle, the roundness of it and the dip when there was a dip. He wanted to press his thumb into it, to feel her pulse through the skin there. She would have a strong artery nearby, the one that made a stomach flutter in rhythm when one was lying down. He would feel her muscles, too, tight and tense under his hand.

She moved a little, sideways and closer to his direct line of sight, but still so far away in the small lake. She stopped instantly, and he saw that her body was rigid with anticipation. She waited, too, but not in the same way. He furrowed his brow and thought of reasons, but then he saw her bare arms hovering on the water’s surface, tiny transparent hairs capturing dewdrops and bathing in the sun. She was blonde. Unless she dyed the hair of her head, but she would be blonde by nature.

As his gaze crept higher, he saw that she was looking at him. Not constantly, no. She turned her head from him to something on the side of the lake, on the path where it would curve around the water. On her right, on his left and further away. He knew this because of the way the tendons attached to her collarbone would tense and relax. The way the muscles of her shoulders stretched. Her collarbone looked like an unbent bow at rest, no need for arrows since her body would be weapon enough.

He should have taken the time to drink from his water bottle. His throat felt like sandpaper, his mouth dusty as he swallowed with a thickness made of nothing. He saw her small round breasts outlined by the wet shirt, and pebbled nipples warning her of inappropriate temperatures and gazes.

The milk of her exposed skin turned red, a creeping flush of rose-tinted emotion like the shadow of a retreating dusk. That could never be captured, a human blush. It was a phenomena ungoverned by physics. No one had ever captured it. Oh, there were paintings of coy maidens with rosy cheeks beckoning for sin, but it wasn’t truth. A blush was a process, a living thing. It’s movement as vital as its color and its meaning. No one could capture how it burgeoned, painted by heart’s blood, and leapt away as easily leaving only a memory of its beauty.

Her blush…her blush was consuming. A revelation, a stained glass, and this one, right then at that moment, was his alone. It would never paint itself the same again and would never be seen by other eyes.

It was a thing he never could have carved on his best day, a thing to keep close in his mind, to tell him there was more of worth in his world than heartless soulful stone. He watched her blush as his blood silently answered by speeding through his veins.

“Why are you staring at me?” her voice now was a whisper so low it could barely be heard.

_Because you are glorious. Because I want to trail my fingers over your skin and make you blush always._

“You told me not to move,” he said in as low a voice as she.

She brought one arm close as if beginning the motion that would cross both over her chest, but she stopped and remained perfectly still. She wasn’t looking at him. He heard a breath over on the path, in the place where she gazed. An intake, an exhale through heated nostrils. A rumbling, grating, low and building.

Jaime didn’t know that sound, not right away. He’d never heard it before, at least not in person. It was a purring like a plump happy tomcat, but not at all happy and not small. Building and building, it eked out over the water until it bloomed into a full growl.

She moved, fast and with grace, toward him. “Get in the water!”

He did, immediately, just as swift as she, wading into the scum of the green froth until his already unsuitable shoes were rendered worthless, his trousers soaked through, the bottom of his thin shirt clinging to his skin in mimicry of hers. He stopped in front of her body, with the space of two outstretched hands between, and his heart was beating so fast, so loud, and he would see her face now that the sun’s glare gave up daring to impede his view. Slowly, he scanned higher, higher. He would see her face.

He was distracted by her left arm as it rose and shot past his right shoulder. Would she touch him? Would her fingers graze his flesh?

She gripped those long, sturdy fingers around the strap of his rucksack and yanked him around. He couldn’t see her face or much of her at all. He wanted to yell about it, but he was forced to see the path where he had just stood.

A cat prowled there, calculated movements taking it back and forth with a clear strategy to ensure its prey did not escape. It was large and confident, a beautiful, sleek beast with spotted fur pristine and glossy. Its great green eyes fixed on him, on them, confined there in the water. It would have been an object of strength and fascination, of majestic natural splendor if not for the woman next to him, and he had not seen her face.

No jungle predator was worth his time. He was like the cat with its watchful eyes and singular intent. He didn’t think the beast had frightened her. He had detected no motion or tension that would suggest fear, more a healthy respect and a desire to avoid damage to her lovely skin from marks by tooth and claw.

“I’ll scare it off,” he said with utter assurance that he could. It was just a cat. He was a lion.

An inhalation, a tension building in her muscles as he watched her arm from his periphery.

“You’ll make it angrier,” she asserted. “We have to wait it out. I don’t particularly want to lose an eye or gain another scar.”

She was whispering, almost to herself with that last phrase. He had seen no scar, but he had seen so little. Where was it? What would it look like? How would he capture it? He hated that she was scarred, because it meant trauma, but scars were so interesting. So unexpected sometimes. Though it would mar her beauty to most.

He had to see her. He had to. He moved forward, back toward the path as he stared into the cat’s eyes. He rose out of the water and stopped just out of claw’s reach, and he raised his arms from his sides, dripping sheets of water, and he roared louder than even he expected. It was a cleansing thing, becoming an animal to frighten a lesser animal. He was the predator protecting what was his.

The cat shrunk back, its ears flattening against its smooth fur. It flashed an almost defiant look, a look that would say _I’m tempted to call your bluff,_ but the beast determined that would be unwise. It stepped backwards, once, twice, then turned and ran into the thick curtain of vines.

Jaime lowered his arms, expelled the buildup of air in his lungs. He felt puffed up and important. He felt powerful. That was new. Now. Better than any memory.

He would see her, in mere moments. He had to speak before he couldn’t, and take a beat to control his blood. She would probably run from him if he couldn’t temper the way he knew he would look at her.

“We should leave. It might return and decide I’m not such a threat after all.” He was surprised at the lack of arrogance in his voice. He had thought he might sound unbearably proud.

There was a slight splashing, just behind him. He felt heat radiate from her body, the sun beginning to evaporate the damp immediately.

He turned. His sodden shoe caught a submerged root or tangle of vegetation, and he stumbled forward. He’d fall, dammit. He’d ruin the thrum of power that ran through his body from the beastly confrontation.

She caught him. Her hands rushed forward to grip his arms above the elbows, the strength in her shoulders instantly stopping his forward momentum. He had not thought about her height when in the water even though it had pooled around his navel and hers identically. He saw then, amused and delighted, that they were the same height, or nearly the same. He forgot about his feet and tried to move closer to her, but he began to tangle again.

She bent her arms and took a step herself, using her large body to block him if his feet decided to make a fool of him again. He blinked into the sun, clearing his vision and his thoughts. He swallowed to moisten his parched throat. He ignored the cascade of blood draining suddenly south.

He blinked, and when he looked, there was only blue. He didn’t see her face. She was too close, not close enough, and he saw her eyes, only her eyes. They were blue. He didn’t have a name for their color. It wasn’t one color but a thousand, not one shade but a spectrum. Sapphire, if he had to have a name, but that was woefully insufficient. Those blue eyes were large, wide and open and deep as deepest water. Framed by translucent blonde that caught glimmers of sun. Swirling blue, magnetic blue. Mesmer shades of stone and sea.

Nothing could capture that blue, no brush nor tint no matter the skill. A second thing about her that defied his chisel. Two things. Blush and blue. It was remarkable, to know he couldn’t ever have created beauty in this way. It was freeing and obsessive, considering how it might be done only to abandon his fruitless musings almost immediately. It couldn’t be done. She was too beautiful.

She stepped away. He was unnerving her, he knew. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t stop himself from staring. She stepped away and didn’t look at him, and she began to walk down the path at a rapid clip.

Jungle beasts, he reminded himself. He watched her walk ahead, her gait, the way her hips swayed just slightly as she moved. Men didn’t do that. He didn’t think she knew she did that, either. She seemed so controlled. But no amount of muscle altered a female center of gravity, and it settled in the hips and made them sway. His mind drew lines down the backs of her legs as she walked, sketching studies of motion and muscle. This was how she would be in the marble, tensed for motion. He watched for a long while.

 

 


	4. Beauty is the Purgation of Superfluities

 

At the edge of the jungle, where he had bemused himself with the idea of it as a crossroads between civilization and barbarity, he stopped. She marched on into the light, shoulders back and head held high as her drying shirt stiffened around her body.

He watched her bathe in the sun as each little ray poured over her, first the outline of her right arm, then her shoulders. The top of her head where light caught the mop of blonde straw, six or more shades of flax on first tally. The back of her neck. Rose crept up as if on a vine. She stopped.

She was attentive. She had not heard him follow, so she had been listening to his silence from behind. His breath. Her arm rose, her hand moved. She gave a stilted, tense wave.

Jaime glanced over her shoulder for a moment. The doorman who had told him about the crazy tourist before was grinning and waving at them both as he tossed a forbidden cigarette into a potted palm.

She inhaled and held the air within, steeling herself, he thought. She glanced back, over her right shoulder, very quickly, alabaster skin glowing too bright from the sunlight to see her features clearly, but her nose managed to distinguish itself from the landscape in profile. It was not straight, not aquiline nor Volantesque in form but rather a broad and stoic gatekeeper with a bridge bordering on gnarled. Fascinating, the idea that she’d broken the delicate bone of her nose likely more than once. Her body was beginning to challenge his skill, or the skill he once had. Her nose would not be so easy to free from the marble, and he revered its puzzle as a precious gift to occupy his thoughts.

He heard a low rumbling, not like the grinding of stone but the mutter of a creature. Her voice.

He blinked. She’d spoken. He knew that, but his mind had been fixed entirely on parsing her features without considering that she might speak to him again.

“What?” he asked in a perfectly even, normal tone. He hoped.

She grumbled. The fingers of her left hand folded into her palm and squeezed. She was about to punch him or run away, he couldn’t decide which. Maybe she couldn’t, either.

“Thank you,” she offered loudly and gruffly, and she inhaled deeply. Her chest expanded, her still-damp shirt clinging more, showing more.

His brow furrowed as he tore his gaze away only to watch her fingers twitch. “For what?” he managed, despite the way her longest finger, the middle one, rubbed its tip against the pad of her thumb, round and round as the other fingers flexed around the motion.

All the air she’d stored before burst out, and her arms rose a little so her hands could slap down against her sides. Exasperation. She spun around. He was unprepared and left scrambling to determine where to look. The sun blurred her into a vignette. It wasn’t fair, this conspiracy of nature to blind him to her being. Except for her eyes. Stunning eyes, astonishing eyes…

“Thank you for scaring off that cat. I might have been stranded in fetid water for hours if you had not done that stupid thing. I need a shower, and so do you. Thanks.” Each word was clipped and formal, addressed to a vine over his left shoulder and not to his face.

He barely heard her. He was far too distracted as the sun deigned to show him the shape of her lips, large and plump, bitten almost raw to match the tension in her body. Stained the rose of her deepest blush. Wrapped indecently around syllables as words pushed through them.

She spun back and returned to her marching.

It took him a moment, with his mind lost in the fantasy of her lips. He stepped out of the jungle’s shadow and move fast. “Wait!”

She slowed but did not stop. “Why?”

“Just…” he scrambled for words that would make sense, for excuses. No use. He blurted, “Have dinner with me?”

She halted as if she’d turned into the creature imprisoned in his block of stone, somehow perfectly formed without intervention of his hands or his skill. She turned, just a little, painfully slow until the very edge of her periphery could catch him, a sliver of glorious blue fixing on him. “What?”

“Dinner? I…I don’t like to eat alone in public.” He was instantly shocked by his admission. He never said that aloud. Only his brother knew, and that more by virtue of proximity than confession.

She blinked. He saw the glistening of the sun as her lashes shuttered over the blue as if opening and closing a window. He watched, fixated, knowing there was more he could paint, but her eyes were still too much, too ethereal and untouchable.

She looked at him. He waited. He felt her gaze scrape over his body like a sharp chisel forging shapes in stone. She saw the stump. He knew she would, he didn’t hide it behind him; he didn’t cover it with his hand. He was rooted there in the dirt road as if the trees had come up to claim him.

She blinked. She swallowed. “I wouldn’t think you the type to be embarrassed by much of anything.”

“Yes, one would think that.” He tasted acid from the bitterness of his words.

She inhaled, her lips parting as he stared in fascination and then dismay. She was going to say no. She was going to refuse because she didn’t want to be seen with him. He took two steps forward. “Drinks then? On the beach?”

She met his gaze for the second time. He couldn’t read her, she was so controlled. She exhaled. “Why?”

He had to be careful, mindful of her stance, attentive to her flush. She would bolt like a frightened foal if he made even a small misstep. He could see it in the tensed muscles of her neck, the way her hips cocked and the strength of her thigh pushed against the cloth of her trousers, how she would run.

He could call her out on her hesitation to be seen with a grossly disabled failure, but that would be a dare almost. He didn’t want to be a dare.

He could plead, tell the truth and speak of his instant captivation, but that was certain to send her off to the safety of her room, if not the watchmen’s station.

Finally, as she watched, he inhaled as she had before, and steeled himself with a straight spine and a false bravado. “Why not?”

She stared. “I can think of a dozen reasons why not.”

“Is that all? I can think of a hundred reasons why,” he countered with just a little swagger. He felt as if he were facing off with a second jungle beast, this one larger and pricklier. This one he didn’t want to scare away.

She said nothing, her lips a still swath of red against the pale canvas of her face. Her fingers began to relax, the tension in her neck melting back into a state of awareness without the need to dart off at any moment. He had an opportunity, a split second of precious time.

“In an hour, at the restaurant,” he said all in a rush. “I’ll get a quiet table in the corner of the veranda where this,” he waved his stump back and forth, “will be in shadow. Come find me.”

It was nearly imperceptible, so easily missed were he not fixated on her face. She blinked, once, twice, her lips parted as if to speak and then retreating again, pressed together to stop her. And then a nod, so slight, but there. A nod meant yes. A nod meant he would not have to leave her be and watch her from his balcony in a state of pitiful longing.

He felt a childish grin split his face utterly in two, he hoped not maniacal, but he couldn’t help it. He nodded, too, but it was not small or hesitant. “Good,” he said. “An hour then.”

She didn’t nod again. She turned and rushed into the hotel with a speed only slightly slower than a brisk jog.

So he had an hour. One single hour to scour filthy jungle crust from his heated body, an hour to prepare himself for a pleasant, normal meal with a woman whose features had now independently burned themselves into his mind and eclipsed all the other features of all the other people he had ever known. He wondered how she would react if he told her she was his muse, if she would understand what that meant. _He_ didn’t truly understand. He just knew. No matter than he could not carve her any longer, that her unparalleled beauty would be confined to her ephemeral body and not to the eternity of death-proof stone.

He grew sad but it couldn’t last to poison his evenings as his other festering thoughts tended to do. He would see her again, in only a single hour.

\---

The hour crept by as if a spider missing half its legs were bent on crossing the full length of the Hall of Dragonglass at the Palace of Mopatis in Pentos. Jaime was, unfortunately, intimately familiar with the absurdly long hall where he’d spent months restoring marble busts. That hall…it had been utter shit. No regulation of humidity for preservation. No respect for the hours of labour just to maintain one aspect of the horrendously gaudy tourist trap. That should have been a job for his worst student, not the master.

His fingers tapped a staccato rhythm on the dining table, the crisp red cloth preventing the impact of his bones from accomplishing a satisfying thud. He lifted them and ran them gently through his hair as he peered into the side of a sparkling glass. He set them down. They refused to remain in stillness, a representation of the chaos of his mind.

He wore a nice jacket despite the heat, a muted linen affair appropriate for a holiday. He could twist the sleeve in just the right way to hide his stump from the intrusive eyes of strangers. People hated imperfection. She would hate it. He wanted rum so the sharpness on his tongue could distract from his nerves.

She was late now. She might have changed her mind because he was too intense, too damaged for her attention. He’d stared too much until she’d decided he must be unhinged. She wouldn’t meet him there at the dim corner table at the restaurant, isolated as every other guest had settled nearer the beach in the purple light of the night sea. Insects clicked and buzzed, and a thick scent of night-blooming flora filled the air.

The table was shielded by decorative palms in clay pots, as tall as he when he stood. He stared at the storm shutters on the side of the hotel, awaiting with their tight slats and iron wills on either side of each long window. He could hide again inside, but while they could keep him safe from an angry nature they were rendered worthless against the threat of an unwilling muse.

And he still hadn’t seen her completely. That was the tragedy, the knife to his heart. So much more to her, and if he never saw it, he could never peer into the depth of his beloved marble and feign the motions of his hands as he cut away to display her beauty completely.

What if she were gone…what if she’d run off and slung her heavy muddy boots over her left shoulder, her long and gentle fingers twined around the laces as her strong legs lifted her into the rickety taxi to the miniscule airport…

He saw himself swathed in shadow, distorted in the side of the wine glass. Her form manifested behind him. She stood there for too long a moment, so long he could discern between the tropical warmth in the air and the humidity of her breath floating down to the skin of his neck.

He sat straighter, eyes still fixed on the glass as emotions rushed through him, first relief that she’d come, then resentment that he was so tied to her already followed by bitterness from his own pathetic need. “I had thought you liked a good challenge considering your excursions to the jungle, but your tardiness was changing my mind.”

He saw her stiffen, a lithe and blurry spirit in reflection. She would have spoken in a near-whisper had her deep voice not turned it into a slight growl far more menacing than the jungle cat.

“Have a nice evening with your wine. I only came to better thank you for your…assistance earlier, but I don’t need to be here.”

Before she could stride away, he chuckled, almost giddy at this burgeoning game of keeping her near. “You do.” He knew how she would respond, and he was prepared.

“I do not.” She took one step.

“I ordered the Zamettar special, all the local flavors. Would you have the expense go to waste?”

She swallowed so loudly he could hear. She was silent for so long. “I didn’t ask for that. I thought this was only for drinks.”

He shrugged, exaggerated so she would be sure to notice from her stance behind him. “I’m hungry.” It came out low, daring. Not what he’d intended, but entirely truthful.

She spoke to herself, he thought. It was quiet and cautious. “And you don’t like to eat alone in public.” She was convincing herself.

He ducked his head. “No.” Sad, almost. Truthful again.

He held his breath, and finally she moved, skirting past his right side and around the table. There was a candle on the table on a marble base, the carved dip to collect wax done with an amateur hand and uninvested eye. Jasmine-scented wax flowed in a molten ballet down the sides as it froze itself on the way. Fragile strings, then beads, then bulbous drops coalescing once more into a hard puddle with strata like stone.  The candle’s light flickered soft ochre in a dance meant to dispel the encroachment of night and the disguised lanterns planted about to prevent tripping waiters.

He realized that he had not risen to pull out her chair. It would have been polite, and more, he could have been close to her, watching the candleglow flicker over her face, trailing his fingers over her arm by accident as he passed. It was too late. She situated her chair and sat upon it with military precision, facing him with a fearsome grimace that twisted her plush lips, and more than a hint of fear in her fathomless eyes. They were dark moons now, the flickers illuminating dancing slivers of that intense blue he’d seen earlier.

Her eyes were the sea waves he’d considered carving so long ago. Two whole days ago. The spectrum of shade was the same. She seemed _of_ the sea somehow. A mystery creature yet undiscovered yet by man, waiting for him to learn of her.

He allowed his gaze to wander according to its impertinent will. Her hair skimmed her sturdy jaw, almost the color of the candle wax but much lighter in the day. Sunlight absorbed. The humidity had gotten to it, he smiled to himself, the strands untamed and rebelling beyond control like a tangle of wheat stalks in an untended field.

It was curious, how a sculpture could eternalize a movement, the intent of a body or a part of a body in action, and a painting could preserve the shades and depths, but only for a moment. Never more, not even a part of one second. The moment was all that would ever be known of the subject, one moment even though as he stared at his muse, a million moments had already passed. A million flickers of light, twisting of lips, lids shielding eyes and strands of hair embracing the fingers of the wind. A marvel, this thing of life that never lasted while the pathetic snapshot of the artist would outlive it.

She swallowed. She shut her eyes for longer than necessary if only a blink against the dim light. Her voice was steel and sadness. “Why are you staring at me again?”

It wasn’t a question. It was a weary sort of expectation, as if she believed herself to know the answer already and was simply prepared for it.

His hand cramped painfully, and he realized it had been clenched against his thigh. He wasn’t sure for how long. His fingers released slowly, and he did not cease his staring. He could not help his need nor his honesty. She would simply have to understand.

“Because you are beautiful.” How inadequate his description, he knew, but his medium was not words.

She flinched and pushed herself against the creaking back of the wicker chair. Pain flooded her eyes so strongly it was as if he’d harmed her. Her fingers wrapped around the chair’s arms in a vice grip.

“Why would you say that?” she hissed. “What do you want?”

He could feel his brow furrowing in confusion. “I said it because it’s what I see.” He couldn’t say what he wanted, not yet. Mostly because he didn’t quite know.

There was a war in her eyes. She was going to dash away. She was going to throw her water goblet at his face. She was going to cry. She wasn’t reacting at all, which made Jaime suspect that she was concertedly trying not to.

His staring must have been too obsessive again. She was frightened. He would have to explain the best he could.

He blinked, trying to interrupt his fixation enough for coherent dialogue. “I was a sculptor.”

Her gaze flickered to his stump, he could see. He’d forgotten about it, the stump. He hadn’t noticed that he’d rested it on the table in plain sight, even though she’d clearly seen it earlier.

The tension on her face did not relent, but she did not leave.

“I saw you, and…” he sighed and ran his fingers through his hair again, this time in frustration rather than the desire to smooth the strands into acceptable public status. He peered at his stump. “If I could still work, I would want to carve you. I would ask you to pose for long exhausting hours while I ripped bits of stone away to reveal a pageant of your body.”

She blinked, her blush speedy as it rose higher. Her gaze traveled over his face as his waited. The furrow of anxiety between her brows grew deeper. Her nostrils compressed in defense. Her lips formed a downturned line, an impenetrable wall to safeguard her. “Are you mad?” she finally asked.

“Probably,” he admitted, not quite caring about his own state of mind when hers was far more worrisome.

She swallowed thickly, shook her head a little. She released the tension of her lips as if to speak, but thought better and grasped for water as if in a desert. He watched the muscles of her throat ease the cool liquid down. The tendons along her shoulders had turned into taught cords.

“How…” she swallowed again, set the water down, folded her fingers together, released them, repeated. “How could you say that.”

It wasn’t a question. He could see it clearly in her troubled eyes.

“Well, _probably_ is fairly simple word to wrap one’s tongue around. I suppose some people could have trouble with the consonant combin—”

“You know what I meant.” She scowled.

She could wrestle him to the ground, he thought, if not quite easily, then surely through endurance. Her muscles would prevail over his single-handed defense. He wondered what that would be like, what it would _look_ like. In stone. In flesh.

She had to be made to see. He was determined. He sat up straighter, all the way up so his shoulders formed a box in the wicker chair, so his jaw was squared and his own judgmental nose pointed directly at hers. “I meant what I said, and what I said is what I see. My eyes do not lie.”

She scoffed, this time with a certain evident exasperation rather than complete weariness. “You are blind then.”

“No,” he demanded with voice. “I am many things, many flawed things, but I am not blind.”

She stared. She swallowed. “Look at me,” she requested with strange anger.

“I am,” he said. That’s all he had done since her arrival.

“You are not. No, don’t argue.” She waited only a moment until he clenched his jaw with burgeoning frustration. “I think…I think you see what you want to see. I don’t know how you could want to see _me_ that way, but if you do, it’s very wrong. I’m not what you think.”

He twisted his own now-parched lips into a replica of her scowl. “Perhaps you don’t see yourself correctly.”

The tension did not leave her shoulders, but she allowed herself to lean forward just enough that she could see him more clearly over the table. And he could see her as her eyes turned more blue. She fidgeted, her knees cramped beneath the table until she awkwardly pivoted her chair to free her legs. He scanned their length as she stretched them until she caught his line of sight and drew them up so quickly they bumped the table and caused the glasses to rattle.

“Tell me what you see,” she demanded, her tone almost cruel.

He let his eyes wander over her face, down her neck, across her shoulders and breasts. He told her. “I see a flaxen mop of hair that plays by no one’s rules. I see a pair of ears like seashells, one design on a stretch of sand with a million others no two alike. I see a skin so pale it challenges the moon. I see a nose that comprehends strength. I see lips that bear the weight of worry. I see limbs with muscles that dare any artist not to fixate on them. I see a delicate ankle, and the complicated edifice of a foot, the elastic stretch of long fingers, and hips that govern spectacular motion. I see eyes that know they can never be replicated but dare a man to fall into them and try.”

He did not tell her about the blush. That was his alone. He watched it even then, slide just under the translucence of her skin, straight from her heart. He wanted to follow its path with his tongue. The idea promptly shocked him, but it would not be denied its right of consideration. That would be a problem now, he knew. Muses were meant to be incorporeal, untouchable. He could not debase her.

She stared at him, almost intensely as he stared as her. Her eyes were still pained, her brow furrowed. “No, you do not see me at all.”

He felt angry. Of course he saw her, he saw her as no one could.

She pressed on, preventing his retort. “You see parts. You do not see _me_.”

“Of course I see parts. Everything is made of parts. And I see the parts that compose you, and they are beautiful.”

She was silent for some time, judging, thinking, considering. The shade of blue in her eyes shifted, lightened. He was deeply familiar with the flavor of her expression. Pity.

“Is the sea made of parts?” she finally asked with almost-kindness in her voice.

He wanted to lash out at his muse, without pity nor mercy since she seemed to prefer cruelty. He said nothing. Instead, he made himself consider her question, because he found that he could not ignore her.

He didn’t know. About the sea. There were things in the sea but they _weren’t_ the sea, and the sea was atoms and molecules. Chemistry churning about to form its own world. “The sea is a part,” he said.

“Of what?”

“The world.”

“No, it’s not the same. The sea is the sea. One thing, not parts. A person is a person. Not parts.”

“A person is made of parts.” He was growing more and more frustrated. Why couldn’t she simply agree with his assessment of her? Stubborn cow.

She looked at his stump. It made him nervous. “You see the parts that interest you and you don’t care about the whole. A person is not made of parts, the parts make the person. We are not machines. A…tractor, is not a screw and a blade and a seat, it is a tractor made of those things, but it cannot function without them or it isn’t a tractor at all. A person is not parts.”

Jaime found himself to be genuinely angry now. He didn’t want this confrontation; it wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. She was only a muse, not a critic. Who was she to tell him how to see a body? Who was she to know what it was to lose the best part, the part that _was_ the person?

He sat restlessly, his shoulders tight and fingers clenched. “I was a sculptor, and I am no longer a sculptor because I have lost a _part_ that to you is apparently meaningless, but it certainly is not meaningless to me. All I have is yet another part, my eyes.”

She looked defiant and superior. Damn her.

“You are no longer a person, then? Because you lost a hand?”

He leaned forward, almost knocking his goblet off the table. “I am no longer what I was best at and what I wish to be.”

“Then be best at something else,” she demanded.

He laughed. How naïve she was, and young. That he now saw, how young she was. Ten years younger than he, likely more. She was not intimidated by him, though. He would have liked that if not for her misplaced criticism.

He glared at her. “You don’t understand. Art, bodies…me.”

She scoffed. “Of course not, how could I? I’ve just met you, and you have insistently declared exactly what I am when you don’t know me at all either.”

He glared harder. “Then let me,” he demanded, not entirely sure of his own meaning nor intent.

She rested her hands on the table, fingers folded into her palms but not quite forming fists, peering from under lowered brows. “I know how wrong you are, but for the sake of this strange conversation, let us say that my…ankle, is beautiful. Fine, that’s an ankle, but it doesn’t equate that _I_ am beautiful, because I am not. If you do not see that, you do not see _me_ at all. You can’t know a person if you don’t see a person for what they are, and if you won’t see me, you don’t really want to know me. You want a myth you’ve created in your mind.”

“And why would I do that?” he snarled, his forehead now only a hand span away from hers as they battled over the candle’s supple smoke.

“I can only guess. Because I don’t know you.”

He cocked his head a little so he could see the blue past the candlelight’s reflection. “Guess then.”

She sighed. “You have lost a hand and believe yourself incapable of adaptation, so you weave stories in your mind to grasp onto your former occupation.”

He remained absolutely still. He could not absorb her claim, not just then. He would wrap it in parchment and tie it up with string, storing it away for later when he had plenty of rum and the safety of isolation. How unkind of her, too. Bloody…woman.

He cleared his throat of sand that wasn’t there. “Why do you care how I see you anyway? What does it matter?”

There was the pain again, flickering deep in her eyes though she seemed adept at concealing it. “I don’t have to tell you that.”

“I want to know,” he demanded.

“I don’t care.” She was growing more agitated. She was going to bolt.

“At least tell me how I’m wrong?” It was a sick sort of pleading, grasping for her attention. Pitiable.

She waited. Her eyes flashed successive reactions like a ticker tape. “Because I am not beautiful. I am ugly. See that. See _me_ , not parts.” It was a command. A dare, even. She waited.

How absurd she was. He watched, stared. He scanned her with his ever-reliable eyes. Her skin had gone ruddy as she leaned away from the candlelight. Her lips were red as ever, but chapped raw. They were too wide for her face, no golden ratio there. Her nose was broad at this angle, face forward. The muscles cording around her limbs turned into threats. She transformed there in her seat, bit by bit as if she’d shed a skin like a malicious snake.

Why did you do this, he wanted to mutter. Why are you bent on ruining me…why couldn’t I have this one thing, this one harmless thing.

She blinked. Her eyes were pools bright as stars, because a thin film of water filled them as she tried to reign it in. They were the same. Those sapphire eyes, the same and always beautiful.

She rose from her seat, the wicker creaking as if she weighed a tonne. She grimaced. She swallowed. “I’m sure you want to know me now.”

It was most snide thing he’d ever heard outside of his brother’s own words.

He looked up at her, towering over him and coiled for a hasty retreat. “I do,” he said without a trace of cynicism.

There was the brow furrow, the tightly pressed lips. The blush. His eyes followed its path.

She peered at the ground, near her feet encased in simple sandals. “Goodbye.”

It was all she said, or muttered, and she darted away as quickly as she could without jogging. He would follow her. He would…he didn’t know what he would do, or say. He wasn’t quite sure exactly what had happened except that his muse had been viciously killed by her mistress.

What would he see now, when he looked into his marble? Would she still be trapped there, or would it be empty? Would another have taken her place?

Of course not. That marble was hers and would never be otherwise.

He sat in silence as the enormous platter of the Zamettar special arrived, born by a hearty waiter. He picked at it, drank too much rum. The prawns were particularly good. The ridges on their backs looked like the tendons of her neck when she’d been irritated.

He had a dessert of spicy brûlée, in case she might return to apologize for the terrible wrong she’d done. He waited, and he rose from his chair with an intense stiffness in his back, his napkin fluttering to the ground. He left it and returned to his room with a mind in such chaos that he felt almost numb.

 

 


	5. My Soul Can Find No Staircase to Heaven Unless it Be Through Earth's Loveliness

 

 

Dawn had hardly faded into day. Jaime knew that once he made his way down the beach and around the protruding rock formation, his mind would continue to be flooded with images of tidal detritus, billowing sand particles disrupted by swooping gulls, and the absence of a muse.

She had gone this way, the desk clerk had told him. Down the beach towards the rockier shore where yet another jungle route was supposed to lead to a grotto. There was no clear path for him to follow this time. Her steps would have made deep indentations, but the water had obliterated any sign of her passage.

He acclimated himself to the probable truth that she would be long gone, into the dank jungle tentacles again and then flying away before he could persuade her otherwise. He crossed the stretch of sand barefoot, not-quite-appropriate boots tucked in his hotel rucksack. His toes dug into the damp, and he enjoyed the strange sensation of sun-heated surface followed by water-cooled sludge.

Damn her elusive booted feet. Damn her for ruining the artistry of her form with her twisted version of truth. A muse was a hallucination with the singular purpose of sparking fixated contemplation of beauty. He’d found his, found _her,_  but she wasn’t cooperating. He couldn’t scrub from his eyes what she had painted there. Ruddy, freckled cheeks distorted by grimaces rather than silk smooth pale flesh. A crooked nose pointed at him in judgment, not an interesting imperfection in a set of otherwise captivating features. Lips bitten raw, probably from the sourness of her scorn.

She was not beautiful. She was not even close to pretty. She’d forced him to see it, and the shattering of his pleasant illusion did not set well in his gut. He wanted his muse back, with her long naked limbs and magnetic eyes. That woman was gone.

Not the eyes, though, not those. He still had those. And the blush.

She was stodgy, that was the problem. Couldn’t have any fun, wouldn’t admit he might challenge her more than the jungle. Bloody damn blonde muse.

His gaze flickered constantly from the tranquil sand to the scape ahead. It really was a beautiful scene, free of man’s commercial intervention and lush with color. He watched specks of mineral in the rock catch the sun and glisten as if to remind him of the treasures hidden in stone. As if he ever forgot. Yet last night, he had not dreamed of his block of stone. He had certainly dreamed, but not of that. His sleeping mind had been infected by a spectrum of blue.

There was a shimmer over the beach, from the heat and the sun. It distorted the bodies of the seabirds that hopped about, and formed strange reflections on the damp sand. He couldn’t immediately grasp whether the figure perched a short distance down were real or a figment. Perhaps he did not wish to know.

He stopped moving, instead absorbing the convergence of light and shadow, the taste of salt and the mildew of seaweed, the crash of water and the bustle of life. Her mop of blonde turned white in the brightness. She sat on the sand with legs drawn up and her green trousers rolled to the knee, her long fingers scrubbing too roughly over her pale flesh as she blobbed on suncream. Her crooked nose was already too pink, and her lips more roughened than before from further biting and salt air. They were redder, too. Three shades. She was not yet lost to the jungle, and he breathed easier, surprised by the release of tension in his chest. He had not acknowledged it.

A gull landed near her, and she glanced at it, seeing him in his frozen silence. She looked up and shielded her eyes with one hand, obscuring the blue.

He frowned.

“You’re staring,” she said across the space between, weariness lurking at the edges.

He stared a little more. “It’s been three seconds. Why haven’t you thrown a rock at me yet?”

She lowered her hand and turned back to the water. “It would only bounce off your thick skull.”

Her low voice spoke more to herself than to him, but he was not so far away that he couldn’t hear the dulcet acrimony. He moved forward, one foot then the other. “This place is more beautiful than I’d expected.”

Her brow furrowed and her lips turned down at the corners. “You haven’t seen it?” She huffed. “Of course not. You spot the only shell on the beach that hasn’t been shattered by a gull and think everything else is perfection.”

He wouldn’t admit how close that was to the truth. He smirked down at her in deflection, placing his hand in the pocket of his long shorts because he didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t see his expression.

She pushed herself off the sand with easy strength, swinging her own rucksack over one shoulder. “Do what you want. Just don’t bother me about it.”

Jaime felt a split second of panic rush through him. He really couldn’t follow her all day, every day. It wouldn’t be…polite. The idea of returning to the hotel alone where he would eat his lunch in his empty room was an unacceptable thought. He hated nothing more in that moment.

Finally she looked at him since he hadn’t moved nor spoken. She looked for a long time, or maybe not, though it felt like it. Her eyes peered into him. Her brow furrowed more.

“I was an ass,” he said in a rush. It was almost shocking, this strange form of half-hearted apology. He never did that.

Still she looked. “You are an ass.”

He took one step closer, feeling lighter like the gull feathers floating in the breeze. “I will probably always be an ass.”

“I have little doubt,” she mumbled.

One more step, so he could see her blue eyes without squinting. “But it’s not complete, your doubt? There’s a _little_ room for improvement?” She rolled her eyes, and he rushed on so she couldn’t object. “I hear the grotto at the end of the trail has water the color of sapphires and stalactites so green they look like jade.”

She shifted her weight to her other bare foot, her hip cocking to support the weight of her rucksack. “I heard the same.”

“Shame to miss it.” He clenched his hand in his pocket.

She rolled her eyes again, threw her face back to peer at the sky as the sun flooded her skin and beckoned her freckles to bloom. She grimaced mightily before returning her focus to him. “By the seven,” she muttered.

He waited. He could be patient. Sometimes.

Whatever she saw in his face, it stopped the grimace for at least the present. “Fine then. You promised jade and sapphire. I expect you to keep it.”

She turned and stalked off, her military stride not as easy to match as he’d thought. She was taller than him, but only by a little. He wanted to know exactly how much and would have to find a reason to stand close enough to gauge it.

He called to her as he briskly walked. “Never dream of breaking a promise to…really, I should be able to call you something.”

“You’re doing a fine a job with nicknames.” She glanced over her shoulder and frowned. She’d thought she could get further ahead, clearly.  

He smirked and sped up until they walked abreast. “Come now, don’t you want to stroll? Breathe the fresh sea air into your lungs?”

She huffed. “I grew up on sea air. Nothing new.”

Small victories felt bloody wonderful. “Ah, you’ve revealed something about yourself. Careful there.”

He could see her jaw clenching through the delicate flesh of her cheek. “One more word…”

“Of course,” he said, still smirking.

“Argh, will you shut up!” She walked even faster and swung her sinewy arms almost violently.

“That was two.”

He had to sprint to catch her this time.

 

* * *

 

“Technically, I broke no promise,” Jaime insisted, even though she wasn’t being terribly combative.

“I’ve already said it’s not your fault.” She shrugged her strong shoulders as she marched a few paces ahead.

She was almost to the hotel’s stretch of beach and would soon vanish into the seclusion of her room. He would only be able to catch glimpses of her if she lingered on her balcony, and glimpses were simply not enough.

They rounded the rock formation where she paused, scanning the small crowd of guests lounging on the sand. He watched and knew her motive, to find the speediest path around the dispersed pedants who would surely glare as tall shadows for one split second threatened the pursuit of even tans.

“Behind the ochre bikini, right at the puce trunks, through the bar,” he suggested.

She looked over her right shoulder, such neutrality in her expression that he was sure she was restraining herself from some verbal attack. Instead, she followed his path. Too quickly.

There was no time left, and it felt crushing within him. He rushed after her as his gaze bore into the muscles of her back, outlined by her thin damp shirt.

She was in the bar when he caught her, his hand involuntarily darting out to grip her right elbow. Her skin was rough where the bone protruded, but soft all around. Smooth as the surface of the sea.

“Wait,” he commanded, too roughly, but he couldn’t help it.

“No,” she said as she shook his fingers off.

He rubbed them together. They wanted something to do, they wanted to hold a chisel, they wanted to touch her again. “Drink?” he asked, lacking his usual confidence however false it sometimes was.

She glared. “Because that went so wonderfully last night.”

“I’m a changed man.” He tried grinning, to see what that would do.

“In half a day?” she scoffed.

He drew his brows together in faux offense. “Fifteen hours. It’s been ages.” Her red lips parted in preparation for retort, so he rushed on. “And I owe you a better time since the grotto was so ridiculous.”

She huffed, but remained silent for a moment. She glanced away. “It really was.”

“Hole in the wall. No walls though...hole in the rock?”

“I was going with _dank disappointment_.” Was that a hint of a smile at the left corner of her lips? Like the aroma of a smile, unseen but lurking somewhere near, hinting at a full richness. “Nothing but grey. No jade or sapphires anywhere.”

“Oh, there were sapphires,” he said in a strange mumble.

“What?” She finally looked him in the eye.

He swallowed. “Shocking,” he said.

“What’s shocking?” she grimaced. He wasn’t sure why, apart from just being _her_.

“You’re speaking to me.” He grinned again. “I’m very shocked. Drinks?”

“It…It’s _midday_!” she snorted a little in disbelief, like a disdainful hog with the eyes of a goddess.

“We’re on holiday,” he reminded.

She stared. He followed her swiftly transforming expressions until she settled on neutrality once more. “I don’t understand you,” she said.

He shrugged. “Neither does anyone else.”

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, one hip cocking then the other, as his gaze strayed to the fulcrum of her motion. He caught the blush begin along her right arm and flood upward.

She swallowed. “I don’t want to drink at midday. I’m going to wash and read a book. Alone.”

His mind painted the image of her lounging in a large white marble bath, legs too long to fit without uncomfortable bending, so they would drape over the far end, crossed at the ankles and sending perfectly round droplets to pool on the floor. The pages of her book would be slightly dampened just at the edges because she would become so caught in her story that she would run her lithe index finger over her bottom lip and forget to dry it as she read.

He looked up from his unfocused stare at her right hip, but she was walking away. He had forgotten to reply.

“Jaime,” he called after her, his choice random and incomprehensible even to him. “My name is Jaime.”

She stumbled so slightly he wouldn’t have noticed had he faltered in his observation of her movements. “How nice for you,” she called back.

“So drinks?”

But she didn’t reply.

 

* * *

 

She was not going to find him.

Jaime had come to that strangely painful conclusion some time before, but he had not moved from his fortress of rum and silence at the bar’s most central table. He could be seen from the hotel rooms, and the exits to the beach, and from the beach itself. Had she not agreed to drinks after midday? He was sure she had. It had been too early, that was all, so he’d glumly showered in his room and eaten something or other, and he hadn’t sat on his balcony to watch her. He’d just waited and once it was safely _not_ midday but dusk, he had taken his seat at the bar.

He should have ordered dinner. He wasn’t hungry, but he never really was and ordered his meals on a strict schedule, perpetually surprised that he enjoyed the flavors.

He happened to glance up at the hotel, and she stood there, not in the frame of the doorway, but off to its right so she wouldn’t block the path. She wore loose shorts and a thin tee shirt, both dark but not black. Her feet were encased in the same sandals she had worn the night before, her hair tucked behind her ears. It was smooth and clean. He thought she would smell of lemongrass and vanilla, the scent of the hotel’s soap.

She stared at him. He couldn’t discern her expression in the light as the hotel’s fluorescence rested behind her. He waved a little. Didn’t know why.

And he looked down. He wouldn’t hound her anymore. He was already too familiar with being unwanted and refused to plunge himself into a sinkhole of disappointment, particularly when it was of his own making.

The sky was lovely purple with streaks of rosegold like drops of dye swirled with a lazy finger into a pool of water. He had not seen stone the color of that sky, not anywhere. Perhaps he should look for some.

His own stone, from the Yeen quarry, would be arriving soon. He almost didn’t want to see it again, because she would still be there inside but transformed. As if it mattered. He could carve no version of her, muse nor _ugly_ snarling creature, full of disdain.

The tall barstool across from him was pulled back, eliciting a shrill squeak of rubber on polished concrete. He felt the twitch in the muscle of his cheek from clenching his jaw so hard, and there she was, cringing and easing herself onto the stool that was frankly too small for her mass. It was too small for his, and her hips were wider. Her lids were lowered as if conspiring to hide her eyes from him.

“You can’t have been waiting here for me,” she said with some suggestion of disbelief and fright.

He felt almost angry with her for failing to understand that they should have had a silent agreement to meet despite verbal confirmation that they wouldn’t. He remained silent.

She sighed and looked at him, finally. “What do you want, Jaime?”

His name falling from her bitten lips felt as if a faulty electrical line had been thrust into his chest. He squirmed on the barstool, his breath catching from suddenly heavy air.

“I meant what I said,” he offered, knowing it was obtuse.

Her brows drew together, her lips turned down at the corners. It was a hideous habit but he deserved it.

He took a moment and allowed himself to stare as she waited. “I want to know you.”

She glared harder. “Why?”

Another beat, her lids blinking too rapidly.

“I don’t know,” he said with complete honesty. She had ruined herself as his muse, purposefully and mercilessly, had been nothing but brutal to him, nearly. There was that one almost-smile. But her mind was a puzzle, pieces always moving in the depths of her eyes though she gave little away.

She looked at the table, at his tumbler of rum and soda. She reached out one large hand and wrapped her fingers around it, the condensation leaving her skin damp. She took a draught as the smooth glass rested against her plush bottom lip. She grimaced.

“It’s strong.” She set the tumbler down and dabbed at a drop left at the corner of her mouth.

“Black Kraken,” he said, heart speeding as he wondered what game she played.

She blinked, but looked straight at him. “I’m going swimming.”

He wanted to shout at her for taunting him with mere minutes of her company, only to proclaim her hasty retreat, but another thought grew dominant. “At night? That can’t be safe.”

She sneered. “It’s perfectly safe if you’re a good swimmer.”

“I disagree. There are…things, in the water.”

“There are always things in the water.”

“You can’t see jagged rocks. Because of the light,” he insisted.

She sighed and stood. “You don’t want to come then.”

He stood so abruptly his stool almost fell over. “What?”

She raised one brow and leant against the table.

He felt enormous rage flood his limbs, three of them, and he glared at his stump. “I used to be an excellent swimmer.”

She sighed loudly and looked at the sky as she had earlier. She was exasperated. “A one-handed man _can_ swim.”

He crossed his arms in defiance, in defense. “It’s a terrible idea to swim in the sea at night with one functional hand.”

“Then don’t come, but I wouldn’t allow you to drown.” Her expression was guileless and matter-of-fact.

He stared. He could see the shadows of her freckles even then, as the moon was high overhead and pure silver. Her eyes were gleaming indigo.

He swallowed. “If I sink into the depths or become dinner for a ghoulish _thing_ , it’s your fault.”

She began to glide away, her cheap sandals flapping with every step. “A _thing_ would spit you out for sourness.”

He took one last swig of his rum, careful to avoid the place where her lips had rested on the glass, for reasons that were peculiar and uncomfortable. He followed her across the bar and the beach.

She said little as they walked along the waterline, the opposite direction to the morning’s explorations. She asked one question, about his work, so he occupied the short time with stories of his incompetent students. She said he was unkind to them. He said they deserved it.

Soon, they slowed in order to scramble over an uneven natural bridge between the jungle’s edge and the beginning of a massive rockface.

“Where are you leading me?” he asked, not caring but curious all the same.

She glanced back briefly. “It’s supposed to be a small bay surrounded by these rocks. Good for night swimming because of the light, but the sea is safe enough too.”

He imagined her slipping off a slick rock by a black pool of water, bleeding into the abyss without a single soul near. Terrifying.

“Where are you from to so calmly speak of navigating a gaping dark sea?” he asked with intense interest. Which strange region of the world produced such a unique creature?

She waited until they were safely around the rocks and ambling in bleak light toward a tall gap in the rockface. “Tarth.”

“I see,” he offered, but his mind scrambled to retrieve every piece of information he could on the small island off the east coast of his homeland. Fishing industry, he knew. Shrimping. Some trade, some tourism. Beautiful sapphire waters.

Perhaps the island had conspired with the sea to give a ruddy, dour infant the most beautiful eyes ever set in the face of a living thing.

It was too silent. “I’ll call you _Tarth_ then. It will probably annoy you.” He grinned to himself, hoping his move on the game board would prove fruitful.

She halted and turned to glare at him, but the glare quickly faded into her frequently-worn weariness. She knew his aim. She took a moment, to persuade herself, he assumed, that giving in was the easier option.

She sighed. “My name is Brienne.”

Not what he’d expected, though he had not been foolish enough to name her as if she were a kitten. It was a name he had not heard before, old and weighty yet simple. “I like it,” he said.

“Irrelevant,” she said, moving onward again.

He turned the syllables of her name over in his mind until they reached the break in the rockface, through which was a moon-flooded bay and small stretch of sand abutting the jungle’s black edge. It was desolate and almost grim, but at the same time, completely beautiful.

She didn’t look at him as she stopped in a particularly dark shadow near the rocks, stripping her shirt and shorts off with such quick motions it was nearly violent. She darted into the water. She didn’t want him to see her body.

Ridiculous. He wanted hours but needed only a flash of her translucent skin in the moon’s light. Expanses of it hid only by a pragmatic athletic suit. She dunked under and came up again, spitting water and smoothing her soaked hair back with both hands. In the sea, she would be the _thing_ other things feared, strong muscles and fierce determination defeating her enemies.

“Well?” she called, grimacing even then.

He had no suit. Hadn’t even thought about it, but it wouldn’t have mattered since he no longer owned one. He watched her avoid watching him as he peeled his shirt and trousers off. It was always too hot in Zamettar to wear underwear.

He didn’t go into the water yet, some twisted need for her to notice him forcing him to wait.

She swam with easy, lazy strokes, perpendicular to him. She moved to turn around and glanced up, her placid expression instantly transforming into horror as she dunked under and then resurfaced with her back to him.

“What are you doing?” she yelled.

“You asked me to swim!”

“Not…not _nude_!” She slapped the water’s surface, forgetting to shield herself. The muscles of her back were exposed, the planes of her shoulders, the length of her neck.

He waded in, chuckling. He knew her disdain had nothing to do with what she saw, but rather that she saw it at all. He loved her blush, was possessive of it. It betrayed her as it climbed over the skin of her back, so strong even the light of night could not disguise it.

“Your prudish eyes are safe. I’m in,” he said, amused and on edge at the same time. His still felt solid sand beneath his feet, and the water only rose to his chest.

“I’m not prudish,” she insisted with no force whatsoever.

“Innocent, pure white rose!” he shouted gleefully.

She spun around and snarled. “I am not a _rose_.”

She sank backward and moved into a fierce backstroke, putting distance between them. She had not reacted to innocent, nor pure. He suspected she was likely both, but a rose? What a strange thing to hate, and she clearly hated it. He wanted to understand it, but he grew distracted by her movements in the water as her limbs were outlined against the light each time she brought one above the surface.

He had been wrong. She would not slip from a rock and contort gracelessly as she fell. The sea was her home. She transformed in it, a nimble resident elegantly navigating by instinct. Her dark suit was a second skin shielding not enough of her pale flesh. It flattened her chest more than it naturally was, but still his gaze lingered there as her arms flew backward one by one, propelling her onward.

He waited until she took enough time to accept the presence of the naked man in the same body of water. She really had no choice unless she would swim all the way out to sea and leave him there.

He wanted her back. He stood a tense step forward and shouted, “I’m going to swim. If I die, I will most certainly haunt you.”

She faced him, bobbing in the water. He took another step as she replied, “Aren’t you haunting me already?”

One more step and no more sand to rely on. “Does that mean I’m dead?”

He sputtered, sinking his so-clever retort as he dipped too low under the surface. He was unused to the motions of swimming, couldn’t quite grasp treading with only one hand. His stump was proving near useless.

She was there quickly, grabbing his arm and forcing him high enough to clear his head from the water.

He grimaced then tried to smile. “Told you one-handed men can’t swim.”

“And I told you I wouldn’t let you drown. I keep my word,” she said vehemently.

He blinked droplets from his eyes, staring into hers as she bobbed closer than she’d been since she was still a myth standing in the jungle.

Her grip on his arm felt unbreakable. He followed its murky path under the dark water until it coalesced into pure flesh once more. He could carve her in motion, too, amidst waves. Her body would be long and lithe, her face upturned in the white froth. Her crooked nose would gather mist at the bridge. Her lips would be parted and plump.

He needed to understand what her legs would be under the water. He grinned at her as she looked confused, and he sank purposefully and quickly before she could stop him, waiting until he could open his stinging eyes and look up at the filtering moonlight that outlined her above him. Her pale limbs were luminous, her muscles coiled and agile.

He slaked his need with the images frozen into his mind. He felt agitated and elated once more. She had not killed the muse, or rather, beauty did not dictate the muse’s presence. She was not beautiful, would never be beautiful, but beauty was _her_.

He was pulled roughly upwards, blinded by sudden unfiltered light, slapped violently on the back as he coughed.

“Why in the seven hells would you do that?” she yelled at him, her face close to his. “Are you testing me? Did you think I would let you die?”

“Nothing to do with that,” he sputtered.

She floated so close, her innocent beautiful eyes so wide. “Then what?” she demanded.

She did smell of lemongrass. He had been right. The skin of her legs grazed his as she kept them afloat. It was smooth as silk, pale and lovely. Her thigh skimmed along his.

He remembered how to tread water, made himself be adept by necessity. He could not remain that close or she’d see. He turned around.

“I think I can manage. I was trying to…dive.”

He heard her scoff. “You can’t dive when you haven’t adjusted to swimming yet.”

“I know,” he prevaricated. “But I think I can swim a little.”

“Try then,” she said. “I’ll be right next to you.”

So he tried, and he didn’t do so badly. She did not have to hold him up again, both to his great disappointment and intense relief. He could not explain the effect she had on him, not when she was _ugly_ and had altered his muse beyond recognition. Not when she was a sour, distrusting judge.

He tried to swim smoothly and bantered with her, annoyed her, complimented her strength. Hoped he would see her again the next day.


	6. Keep One's Compass in One's Eyes and Not in the Hand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a weird food reference in this chapter. There's a flapjack, and it's the British sort of flapjack which is an oaty sort of bar or square (almost like a granola bar, but chewier and BETTER). It's NOT a pancake :-D This note is me being too lazy to alter the reference.

 

 

He knew he dreamt. He maintained a strange awareness that the vision surrounding him did not exist in reality, that she was not in fact pressed against his body there on the white sheets.

Her hair, stringy from saltwater, spread on his pillow and brushed against his cheek. His chest was weighted by her arm and shoulder, and her soft naked breast. Her breath floated across his lips. She sleepily lifted her leg until her thigh rested on his thigh, her hip over his hip.

He could endure this dream no longer. He jolted upright, beads of sweat dripping down his chest like drops of water had on hers.

He rubbed his eyes with stiff fingers, but he stopped immediately. He smelled like her. He’d used the hotel soap in the shower. He felt enveloped by her when she wasn’t even in the same room.

There was a stagnant glass of water on the nightstand. It tasted like rust. He caught a flash of movement and spotted Mace the lizard scurrying across the back of the wicker sofa. The sea breeze wafted in through his open curtains.

Perhaps she, too, could not sleep. Perhaps she was on the balcony.

He would not check. It would be an acknowledgment of his strange need, and he was almost afraid of that. He did not need people. Needing people was what had gotten him into…the circumstances he’d climbed out of as if they were a bottomless pit filled with blackest tar. He’d found air, but remained covered in stubborn filth for some time after. It was when he’d lost his hand, his purpose, his soul.

He could not need again, and it was absurd even to wonder about that when he didn’t really know her. Of course, that was the problem, his wanting to know her in order to excuse the idea of possibly needing her. Ridiculous.

He thought she probably didn’t actually like him, either. It would only be desolation for him. If she allowed him to know her, he could never do her the disservice of hiding, of concealing who he really was and what his life had been. Once he told her, he would be bound to her somehow, and once she knew, she would, with some undefined piece of himself, be gone.

These days were a figment no more real than his dream. He could at least enjoy them until they grew too painful.

He thought of his students and wanted to throw the lamp at the wall. The impending months of absolute boredom and exasperation were not something he wanted to face, not now, when the spark of creation had been planted in his mind despite his useless limbs.

There would be repercussions from he was going to do, but he found that he couldn’t entirely care. There were few lasting consequences for a Lannister. He believed he had already suffered most. He would call the university when its office opened.

He waited. He watched television without caring that he’d turned to a program about the mating habits of sea turtles. He ordered a large quantity of coffee and bacon and consumed it all. The coffee’s bitterness was pleasant, though he cut it with copious sugar cubes. The grease of the bacon stuck to his fingers and his lips, the meat supple and sweet though it was muscle.

Light began to flood inside his room. It was dawn, and she would surely be awake. He thought she would stretch her arms above her head and glance at the glass doors to her balcony. She would attempt to untangle her hair with her fingers, perhaps wash with that infernal soap. Order her own coffee and clutch the warm mug between her palms as she stepped on the balcony and enjoyed the changing light. It would land on her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose, freckles popping in the gleam and her eyes bright as polished gems.

The telephone in his room rang. It shattered his dream so abruptly he spattered hot coffee on his naked chest. He plopped the mug on the big table and the dabbed at the scalding spots on his skin before picking up the receiver.

“I’m abseiling today. There’s a harness and a tether. You must wear clothing.” Her voice was crisp and alert.

He was silent for too long, grappling with too many potential replies.

“You don’t need two hands,” she insisted.

She sounded frustrated. She extended the invitation without prodding on his part—

“All right then, I’m off,” she curtly replied.

“No! No, I want to come.” The prospect of spending another day with her despite wearing some horrendous equipment and risking a fall was too tantalizing to refuse.

“Are you sure?” this sounded far more hesitant.

“Absolutely.” He nodded as if she could see.

He heard her sigh and desperately wanted to see her face so he could attempt to understand why. “I won’t let you fall if you’re worried about that.”

“I’m not,” he lied, then, “I trust you,” and he wasn’t lying, and it lifted a peculiar weight in his chest to say it.

She was silent for a moment. “All…all right. Down by the desk in ten.”

“Excellent,” he extolled with far more confidence than he felt.

She hung up, and he allowed himself to acknowledge the festering resentment at his own body, only for a moment. Once, he was strong and athletic. Once, he could carry a reasonably large block of marble on his own back, could dive into the sea from terrifying cliffs near his childhood home. Once he had a body the envy of a city. Now he could barely swim, and though she didn’t seem to mind that, _he_ did. He would look like a fool trying to climb with her, but there was no point in pretending he would change his mind. Better to look a fool and feel a sliver of joy than to bask in despair. He was weary of that.

He had eight minutes, and he quickly washed the coffee away and dressed in his most practical clothes, which would still be too flimsy. He would soon need to have some things sent from wherever those sorts of things were made. When he phoned down, the desk clerk promised to have another rucksack packed with enough food for two, and a thin blanket and other items he deemed potentially necessary.

He had a minute to spare when she arrived. He stood by the desk with his fresh supplies slung over his shoulders, a bottle of water clipped to one strap, and a wide grin contorting his lips.

She approached but halted an arm’s length away. “I thought you would be late.”

He stared at her ruddy cheek. “Would you have waited?”

The blush was beginning. “Not that long,” she said. “Come then. It’s a long hike.”

“Of course it is,” he said, not allowing her to walk ahead, not anymore.

 

* * *

 

Three hours they spent, trekking through crawling vines and merciless undergrowth. He did not feel any burn in his lungs, and he did not wish for a more rapid passage of time. She spoke just a little more openly, though she navigated his incessant questions about her life by answering with impersonal tales.

He asked what she was like as a child, and she told him how all the children of Tarth believed there were mermaids in the sapphire waters because the fishermen spun stories of the mythical beauties.

He asked if mermaids had freckles, and she said there was no such thing so the notion was irrelevant.

He asked whether she preferred protein or carbohydrates, and she engaged in a lengthy diatribe about the necessity of balanced nutrition. He told her that he had eaten only bacon that day. She stopped walking and refused to speak or move on until he ate two oaty flapjacks she thrust at him. She made them herself. They tasted like cardboard and he wanted another.

She asked him, once his blood sugar levels were apparently to her satisfaction, why he had come to Zamettar. He did not tell her for many minutes, and she did not press him. The silence was worse than the reaction he feared, so he told her that he had come to see the quarry in Yeen and to perhaps exist in expectationless peace for a very short time.

She said that expectations were ghosts unbound to the limits of transportation. He said she was a cynic. She said he was one to talk.

A great rock formation rose out of the jungle’s green. It was abrupt and magnificent, a natural pyramid tall and thin, grey and green from climbing vegetation.

He stopped and examined it, sunlight glinting off thread-thin streaks slashing through the grey.

He did not realize she watched him until he looked over to her.

“What do you see?” she asked, not cynical then.

He glanced for a moment at the rock before moving to stand by her side. He lifted his hand and pointed, drawing in the air with his finger. “Those sparks against the stone, see them? Ribbons of quartz to bring light to a bleak surface.”

He watched her watch the rock, her upturned face not so far from his. If he moved his hand, he could slide his fingers along the smooth skin of her cheek and watch the blush trail behind like paint on a canvas.

She turned to him with lips parted, but took a hasty step away as she realized how close she was to his body. She looked past him. “What’s inside the rock?”

He gave her the space she wanted and returned to examining the pyramid. “Nothing living. It’s too hard to carve. You could burrow into it enough to make passages, so it would be a stone castle with jagged walls and arched ceilings in small chambers.” He spotted a flock of birds circling near the top, landing amongst the clusters of green. “It would be home only to those birds, just below the clouds where their children would be kept safe from preying beasts down below.”

She stepped forward, seemingly absentminded as she peered at the flock darting here and there against the blue sky. Her foot caught. She thrust her arms awkwardly forward to regain balance, but it was too late, and too late for him to block her fall. He tried anyway, and he might have grabbed her, wrapped his arm around her waist and jerked her body toward him. If he had a hand. His stump was useless. She tumbled down and landed on her stomach and her palms.

“Oof,” she mumbled as she rolled to one side and glared at her feet. Her left ankle was blooming purple above the boot.

He stared at his worthless ragged flesh, furious that it was there, mortified at his ineffectiveness, enraged that she had been injured.

He did not know he spewed curses until he caught her concerned expression. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I distracted you.”

She peered up at him, and it was odd seeing her from this angle, the sun catching the blue of her eyes and the red of her lips. There was a spot of sheen on the bottom one. She had licked them.

“I distracted myself,” she said. “Stupid not to be attentive when there are vines everywhere.”

He glanced at her boots where he saw a thin vine tangled. She sat up fully and used her hands and her knee to lift herself, but she quickly thudded down with a pained look and a profane mumble.

He crouched near her. “Let me see.”

“It’s fine,” she asserted, her brows deeply furrowed and her lips twisted down.

“You’re not fine. Don’t be ridiculous.” He sat on the damp earth near her feet and examined the growing purple stain.

“Bruised, that’s all,” she claimed. He looked at her with one raised brow and a smirk. She stared down at the suddenly fascinating carpet of leaves. “Maybe a bit twisted.”

He would have to touch her to see how much swelling there might be. Strange, how he’d wanted so badly to do so, but now, he was almost afraid, knowing how her skin would feel under the rough pads of his fingers. He swallowed and gripped her calf surrounded by the barrier of her sturdy trousers. He lifted her leg to rest her foot on his forearm where his stump remained useless, supporting her long and heavy limb with his hand.

Lowering his face to see more clearly, he watched the blush glide under the layer of freckles, staining the nasty bruise a putrid shade of mauve. It was swelling fast.

“Just twisted,” she insisted.

“You know it isn’t,” he returned, lifting his leg enough to act as a platform on which he set her leg so he could use his fingers now that he’d summoned enough courage.

He slid the leg of her trousers higher and placed his middle and forefinger on her uninjured skin. He glided them down toward her boot, but the top prevented further investigation.

She sat up and leaned toward him as he tugged the laces of the boot. “What are you doing?” she demanded with a fierce scowl.

“It has to come off. It might be broken.” He knew it wasn’t, but this was a stolen opportunity, to hold her naked flesh in his hand and watch it and remain uncaught.

“I’ll take it off myself,” she said, bending awkwardly and reaching for her boot. The motion strained her injury almost immediately, and she grimaced.

“Bloody hells,” she mumbled, rearranging her expression to hide her pain.

“See?” he prodded, buying time. “You’ll have to allow me to act the medic.”

“Are you qualified?” she asked with such a snide undertone.

“Not at all.” He unlaced her boot and struggled to ease it off the injured boot.

“How can you tell whether it’s broken or not then?” She roughly yanked her leg so the boot fell to the ground, trying to ignore the obvious ache it caused.

“I know bodies.” He shrugged, though he did not know her body at all well enough for his satisfaction.

He ignored her snorts of protestation as he wrangled her thick sock over her heel and freed her foot from its containment. Her flesh was marred by indentations and friction burns, the small oval of rougher skin near her smallest toe developing what promised to be a stubborn blister. He began at the tendons connecting each toe to the base of her ankle, the thin ropes under smooth porcelain flexing under his gaze. He lifted her leg, her ankle inches away from his face. The first part of her he had seen, and he could steal this moment to touch it as he willed, to memorize its texture and its form.

He swallowed and lowered it. Insanity, how her ankle could erase all other thought in his mind and become such a fixation, how the idea of her ankle merging into her strong calf was tantalizing. How her thigh would rest above them both, how that thigh had been draped over him in his dream. He set her leg on the cushion of the ground and leaned back.

“It’s sprained,” he told her. “No abseiling for you.”

“I’ll splint it. It will be fine,” she asserted as she tried to rise once more, but it was clear she could not put weight on her ankle.

“You see?” He stood and glared down at her. “You’ll make it far worse by pretending it’s not already a problem.”

She grumbled and removed her rucksack, fishing for something.

“What are you doing?”

“Finding something to make a splint. Maybe a torch?” she glanced up but it didn’t last.

“A torch? And what will you use to secure it?” He folded his arms over his chest in amusement.

“First aid tape,” she said, still rummaging.

“You’re going to hike three hours with a sprained ankle supported by a bulky flashlight and cheap tape? I’m sure that will work beautifully.”

He considered that she would have done exactly that if he had not accompanied her. She would have struggled for hours in cruel pain. Of course, if he had not distracted her, she probably would not have fallen. He could not be glad of either scenario.

She glared. “Unless you’ve got something else in your pack, what am I meant to use?”

He considered the paraphernalia in his pack, but there was nothing hard enough to use as a splint. He pulled out his extra white tee shirt. “Here, at least you can bind it with more than tape.”

She peered at the shirt, then at him with half-lowered disdainful lids. “You forget swimming trunks to go _swimming_ , yet you brought an extra shirt into the jungle?”

He dangled the clean cotton from one finger, letting it hang in front of her face. “Lucky for you.”

She scowled and yanked the shirt from him. “I’m going to rip it,” she said defiantly.

“I have plenty more.”

He watched her intently ignore him, but that blush lingered on her skin in a tantalizing display. She used her teeth to break the thread at the hem of his shirt and quickly ripped it into a long strip. Her strength seemed so easy, graceful. A torn shirt should not be made interesting. She efficiently wrapped her injured ankle and used her tape to secure the makeshift bandage.

“There,” she nodded in satisfaction, the movement of her hands clearly indicating her misguided intent to rise under her own power once more.

He held out his hand without really thinking about the consequence. It was instinct. She glared at it, but slapped her own hand against it so hard there was a sting on the skin of his palm. Her fingers wrapped around his wrist. He remained rigid as she used his strength to rise without any weight on her bad leg, and she kept hold her until she found her balance. He did not move once despite the burden of her weight.

He looked her in the eye all the while. She seemed surprised.

“Thank you,” she mumbled, lowering her foot to test the weight.

He stepped slightly closer. “Come now, Brienne, you can’t walk on it. You know that.”

He instantly struggled to maintain what he thought was a casual, bemused expression. He had not said her name before, not outside his mind. He had almost stopped himself even from thinking it. It made her too real. The muse had no name, but _she_ had a lovely name, and saying it was an unsettling confirmation that the muse had merged fully into the woman before him, with her reddened nose and crooked teeth. He didn’t know what to do with the idea. He was no less fascinated by her. He didn’t know what to do with that either.

Her eyes snapped up when he spoke. She saw it, too, she must. That the speaking of her name was new and disconcerting.

“I will walk,” she said with vehemence.

He knew he would see pain on her face, but she was too stubborn for it to be prevented. “Fine then, walk.”

He knew she would see it for a trap. The furrow in her forehead grew deep with the expected suspicion, and she watched him as she took a step. There was a second of satisfaction before the injury rebelled, and she nearly buckled. This time, he caught her, arm around her waist, fingers digging into her side. She leant against him before righting herself. He did not remove his hand.

He watched her neck as she swallowed her disdain. “I might not be able to walk.”

He grinned. “I had no idea! How shocking.”

“Ass,” she said.

“You knew that.” He slid his hand along the muscles of her back as he backed one step away, merely an excuse to feel the stretch of her form beneath his fingers. He sighed in false exasperation. “No use staying here in the middle of nowhere. It will take longer to return, so we should get a start now.”

She glared. “I just admitted I can’t walk yet. I’ll have to find a stream and some cold water to reduce the swelling.”

“You think we’re just going to linger out in a _jungle_ for ages while you’re injured?”

“No other choice, is there.” She poked her long finger in his direction. He wanted to lift it and press it to the skin of his chest.

“There are always choices.” He found another excuse, this time to scan her head to toe, one foot unbooted and free, one trouser leg torn to reveal a miniscule patch of pale bare skin, her shirt tight over her chest and gaping as a button had been lost. Her freckles bloomed all over. Her blush began at the place just above her heart. He found her stunning eyes. “Get on my back.”

Her legs would be wrapped around him, her breasts pressed to his damp skin. Perhaps this was a terrible idea.

“What?” she shouted.

He didn’t care about terrible ideas. “You heard me. I’ll carry you.”

“You can’t carry me!” she threw her hands high and slapped them against her thighs, nearly losing her precarious balance.

“You think I’m not strong enough? I _am_.”

“You…” she sputtered, “your…”

“My what? My _stump_?” he glared without real anger. “You think I can swim and climb but not lift you? You might be a tow-headed plank, but I’m suited to you just fine.”

Her lips were turned down magnificently. “How clever, Jaime. How long have you been waiting on that one?”

He thought he might blush a little for that, if he could. He glanced at the hanging vines. “Awhile.”

“You will not carry me!” she said in a clearly concerted, even tone.

He shrugged. “All right. I’ll call for help.”

“We’re not in Astapor, there is no _help_.”

He removed his rucksack and found his satellite phone, waving it at her. “I can find help anywhere.”

She scowled at the device. “How do you have that?”

“I…” he felt suddenly grim, weighing how she would never look at him in the same way once he told her, but he did not want to lie. “I’m…not poor.”

She put her hands on her hips. “Yes, I gathered that already.”

He felt almost defiant. Best to get it out now. It wasn’t as if she could run away from him, but that felt like entrapment. He felt crestfallen and sneered at the green earth. “I’m not sure you want to know.”

“Why not?” she demanded.

He snapped his gaze to hers, watching every flicker of light, waiting for judgment. She might now know anything beyond his name, but that would be enough. “I’m Jaime Lannister.”

He saw the growing awareness on her face, the connection between his claim and her prior knowledge. Her blush grew, and he knew why, the things from the whispers of society that would now flood her mind. The things that were true. She would doubt them unless he allowed her to know him, and whatever decent opinion she might have of him would be poisoned.

“I’m probably exactly what you think I am,” he blurted defensively, as if his brain wished to rip a bandage fiercely off a wound that had not yet been inflicted.

She blinked rapidly. She swallowed. “I’m not sure what you are. Other than being an ass.”

He blinked, too. “Why aren’t you angry?”

“Why would I be angry that you have a famous name? You didn’t choose it for yourself.”

He didn’t know what to do, how to behave. His nerves were sparking under his skin. He was restless and confused. “I can use the phone, and someone will find us.”

“No vehicle could pass through this undergrowth,” she asserted.

He stared at her in challenge. “Probably a helicopter.”

She turned bright red. “And then what? You would have a _helicopter_ hover over the jungle and string me up by rope ladder, and then what? Land us on the beach in full view? Absolutely not.”

“Then get on my back,” he said with a shrug far more casual than he felt inside. Why was she not spewing insults at him? Accusations about his character?

She sighed heavily, her old weariness returning. It had been at least a day since he’d last enjoyed it. “You leave me the choice of rescue by helicopter or riding on your back like a child? Of course you would.”

The idea of her riding sent a spark up his spine. He wished she had not so cavalierly used such a word. He grinned instead of staring at her so intensely that she’d surely hobble off into the veil of green. “It seems so.”

She scanned the area. “No, I think I can make it if you let me lean on you.”

“You can’t.”

“Of course I can.” She glared.

“Vines.” He smiled while pointing at the numerous, treacherous snakes waiting to injure her further.

A spark lit in her eyes. “Exactly. How are you meant to carry me through this without tripping yourself?”

He glared. She was not wrong. Surely there was something…

He looked at his rich man’s phone and the map it contained. He had trusted her on every other journey, no need for maps. But he wanted to see if he were right in his judgment of their location, and indeed, he was.

The grin on his face was not at all superior. Not even a little. “It’s three hours back, probably more with our pace, but Yeen is much closer. If we get there, I can have a car waiting. No embarrassing helicopters.”

She glanced at her ankle and then at him, at the thick jungle. She sighed. “Fine,” she muttered. “You win. I’m sure you’re used to that.” She grabbed his rucksack and stuffed it into hers, shoving her lone boot and sock inside as well, and tightening it over her shoulders.

“Not so much as you think,” he mumbled without thinking. 

Her eyes snapped up, her brow furrowed. He turned away from her, requiring for the first time an interruption of her gaze. It had weight and flavor. It had meaning too deep to deny. It was beginning to hurt.

He felt the warmth of her body by his side, glanced at her because he must, and waited as she hesitantly lifted her arm to drape over his shoulders. The weight of her muscle sank into him, though she was stiff and self-conscious. He stepped closer until his hips brushed her just as it had in his dream, but this time, there was the frustrating barrier of cloth.

He stole a look and frowned. “Are you certain you can do this?”

She stared straight at him. “I enjoy a challenge.”

He blinked away. “I’m not sure your ankle will agree.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said.

He acclimated himself to the feel of so much of her in contact with so much of him, and he slid his arm around her waist. “Good thing you’re a tow-headed plank.”

“Shut up,” she said, not a hint even of frustration this time. 

 

 


	7. Art Lives on Constraint and Dies of Freedom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this is not done today to end Appreciation Week :-p
> 
> Oh well! Ten chapters total.

 

 

From its steady pedestal high overhead, the sun’s heat seeped through damp clothes and sticky skin. Jaime was glad his rucksack had been filled with extra water despite the added weight. Even with the previously chilled artisanal bottles Brienne had mocked as unnecessary extravagance, the supply was nearly gone when they finally spotted a thin trickle of winding smoke above the tree line.

He sighed to himself and gripped her tighter. It had grown so easy between them along the way. He could not remember when he had felt as relaxed in the company of anyone apart from his brother, and even then, _relaxing_ was not a word to describe time spent with Tyrion Lannister.

He’d told her of Tyrion so he could avoid speaking of himself. And he’d thought he had to speak or the closeness of her body would have become far too intoxicating. She’d laughed at his story about Tyrion spending a night in jail for drunkenly snogging the Prime Minister’s married daughter. The sound of her breathy amusement so near his ear had made him quite uncomfortable. And addicted.

He’d told her of his last good student who’d gone to work for the National Museum. He’d spoken of stone and where to find the best of each kind. He’d taken a risk and enquired about her profession, so casually and calmly as if it mattered not at all.

She’d taken time to reply. He had almost felt the hesitation radiating from her chest. But she’d spoken, low and lyrical next to his cheek as they walked, each breath floating into him as he proceeded to learn her.

She was a relief worker. Of course she was. A body like hers would be well suited to the rough conditions and challenging climates of areas in need of such relief. He’d made the mistake of telling her so, and she had not spoken much since.

The smoke strengthened and wound like an amorphous snake through the bright blue. The clear sea-stained sky was not as lovely as her eyes.

He had to break the silence. “I want to find ice for your ankle.”

“I thought a luxurious, air-conditioned car would be waiting,” she spoke in a snide, sing-song way.

He hoped it wasn’t. Not yet. “Might still be on the way. Besides, you need rest and probably something to eat.”

“You suddenly remember proper meal times now? After your feast of bacon in the middle of the night?”

“It wasn’t! It just wasn’t quite dawn,” he insisted with a small smile.

She shook her head, causing the ends of her hair to brush his neck. “No wonder you’re huffing along.”

He looked at her, too close to see but that wasn’t the point. “You know I’m not. I’m in excellent condition.”

“I know no such thing,” she insisted.

“Oh yes you do. I saw you looking.”

“I have not! When?” She almost halted her difficult hopping motion.

He would have tapped his finger against his lip if his hand wasn’t at home over her hip. No sense in removing it. “I believe it was night, and the moon was high. You were swimming and I was naked.”

She did halt then, glaring and trying to remove her arm from around his shoulders. He stopped her, digging with his fingers into the flesh of waist but not hard enough to cause pain. “I was not _looking_! I...I glanced up and there you were. It’s your fault.”

He stared at her. “You should learn to take a joke.”

“You should learn not to be an ass.” She resumed hopping, speedier.

“I thought we both agreed that’s not likely.” He chuckled.

Her brow furrowed as she glanced at his face, scanning his features. It felt as if he were being painted by her somehow. “Why are you so…not glum?”

He supposed he probably was glum, most of the time. But not then. “I don’t want you to be injured, but I’m having a good day.”

She scoffed. “Why?”

Then he did feel a bit glum. “You’re not? I…see.”

She was silent until they reached the very edge of the settlement. Jaime recognized the style of the structures from his previous trip, and he thought they were fairly close to the quarry. If anyone had ice, it would probably be the funny little manager.

Scampering children began to cluster and stare at the two tall blond strangers moving slowly along the village’s perimeter and toward the main avenue. She spoke then, finally. “I am.”

“What?”

“I am…having a good day.”

He wouldn’t allow himself to smile. That would be annoying. “Despite the ankle?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to see what hideous shade it’s turned.”

“I believe it will be the shade of coagulated blood beneath a veil of pink.”

“Why thank you for the painterly lesson. I’m now more anxious to see the carnage.” She was back to the sing-song he now recognized as her sarcasm. It was flowing more freely. “Where are you going?” She stopped as he turned toward the quarry instead of the more populated area to the right.

“I know a man nearby, the manager of the quarry here where I bought stone. He’ll help until the car arrives,” he insisted, a fomenting need to show her the rows of stone giving birth to inspiration. He wasn’t entirely sure what difference it would make, maybe none at all, but he wanted her to _see_ where her stone was born. Even though she wouldn’t understand. No one did.

The children of Yeen were forming a laughing gang behind them, following their movements and exclaiming about their height and their funny looks, despite speaking a language Jaime didn’t understand. The intent was clear enough.

He watched Brienne’s face as she glanced back ever few moments. Fondness, amusement, benevolence, sharp pain. She tried to conceal that, but her eyes gave her away. The third time he caught it, he could not stop himself from asking. “What happened that you’re here? I don’t believe you’re the type to take a holiday like this. Not without a good reason.”

She scowled and he let her, until the lines on her forehead smoothed and her eyes pooled her pain in the corners without her permission. She looked away. She wanted to tell him, he could see it, but he would not press her this time.

He spotted the fence to the quarry, only a little further now, and the small office just inside. He would commandeer the manager’s chair and find her some food and water. He would see where the car had gone after all this time. The driver was supposed to call on arrival.

“Almost there,” he said softly, feeling her center of gravity sink as her body grew weary from the painful exertion.

“I was in Asshai,” she said in a rush. He flattened his fingers against her waist. She sucked in a long shaky breath. “There was a child…a boy. He liked me. He died.”

That was all she said, and though bereft of all detail, it was quite enough.

“I’m sorry,” he said, cringing at the inadequacy of his words.

“Everyone is always sorry. It changes nothing.” Her bitterness poisoned her words as they crossed her bitten lips.

“It never does,” he agreed.

She looked at his arm with it’s raw, ruddy stump of flesh, and then at his face though he peered forward at the fence because it was safer.

Neither of them had time to express any further despair over the inadequacy of sympathy, as the little manager fellow burst out of his office and darted toward them.

“Mr. Lannister! What has happened, Mr. Lannister!” He halted in front of them and oddly patted Jaime’s arm in his strange form of concern. “Have you been harmed? We do not allow such things, I swear, we do not!”

“No, no, we’re fine. My…friend here, tripped over vine and is injured. We were out in the jungle.” Jaime could not meet Brienne’s gaze, so he focused on the friendly manager only.

“The jungle! You are mad! It’s crazy there,” he tsked and shook his round head. “Come, come, I have coffee inside.”

Jaime helped Brienne up the several rickety stairs into the office where she could finally sit on a narrow chair that at least had a cushion. As she slid out of his grasp, his body felt too light, relieved of some necessary attachment, almost as he’d felt when he’d awakened to find his right hand gone. It was an absurd comparison.

The manager poured small cups of rich, dark coffee, thick with sugar and a hint of something spicy. “Enjoy this fine speciality,” he said with pride, “and there is clean water here, and fruit and bread. I have no cheese, but I will find something—”

“No, please,” Brienne interrupted, her fingers wrapped around her tiny cup. “Don’t go to any trouble. I am grateful enough for the use of your chair.” She smiled gently, barely showing teeth, but it was a smile Jaime had not seen. A smile for a kindness done and not a smile she’d given to him.

He coveted it. He wanted it flashed at him, but he was not a kind person. Yet she had not abandoned him. That was something.

The little man beamed. Jaime did not ask for ice, seeing there would be no place to store it in the office, but he glanced at Brienne’s ankle to see it swollen quite horribly above the binding of his shirt and her tape, and indeed, a terrible hew of burnt aubergine. Old, dying blood deprived of oxygen was an ugly thing at best.

She caught him staring. “It looks worse than it feels,” she said.

He knew she lied from the twinges she kept hiding. “You’re terrible at deception.”

She shrugged a little. “It’s better to try.”

The manager followed their exchange, gaze flickering from one to the other until he merely stared. Jaime thought the little man might sense another enormous sale and couldn’t blame him for the anticipation.

His satellite telephone rang from inside his rucksack. He fished for it, and listened as the expected car’s driver informed Jaime that a tree had fallen in the road and it would take much longer to arrive. Jaime thanked the gruff-sounding man and repeated the information to Brienne.

She was bone-tired, he could see it. Her body would be funneling energy to her injury to assist with the pain and the healing, and she had not eaten recently. As if the little manager could read minds, he grinned and grabbed a basket with fruit and the local bread in it, and set it before Brienne on a tiny table. “Enjoy!” he said, beaming more. “And then, perhaps you would like to see your stone?”

For some strange reason he could not identify, the idea was _wrong_. It just felt…dangerous. He did not want to see it again, not yet, for she who was imprisoned inside might have transformed too much to understand. She would not be the same, he knew that, because his muse was not the same, and he was having a great deal of difficulty contemplating the woman in the stone without straying to woman in flesh who could speak and call him an ass. He wanted his lovely stone to retain some semblance of the wonder he felt upon first glimpse, not become just another block like that he’d carved his mother’s face from. It was unsettling. And he didn’t want Brienne to see it.

“No,” he said as calmly as he could, “but I might look at others again. We’ll see.”

The little man nodded excitedly. “Of course, of course. Oh, you should have seen it! How they block was moved when it did not wish to be moved, Mr. Lannister! The big crane, and the weight, it was the heaviest! All packed up now, wrapped in wool.”

He felt the stone’s draw even then, magnetic, pulling away from _her_. He did not heed it. “I hear it will arrive in Zamettar soon.”

“Yes, yes, once the truck arrives. Imagine that! A whole big truck on a boat all the way from Astapor, just to come get this marble that doesn’t want to leave!” The little man chuckled to himself and reached for a juicy plum.

Brienne looked at Jaime with one raised brow and a slight smirk. “All the way from Astapor. Imagine that.”

She thought he was ridiculous. Of course, that was true. He felt governed only by impulse in this place, so close to stone and so close to her, his arm still feeling empty after hours of touching her. His fingers were twitchy against his palm.

“I don’t want you to walk, but I want to show you something,” he blurted out, nervous and eager at the same time. He turned to the manager. “The cart you use to move the cut slabs, could it bring her to the storage area?”

The little man stared at the plum in his hand, considering.

Brienne began to flush. “Please, I don’t want to inconve—”

“Oh, no, no, it is no inconvenience! Gladness and joy!” the manager asserted. After the amount of money Jaime had paid, nothing would be. “I will have it brought to the door, yes? You wish to show her the slabs? She can choose for you!”

He rushed out the door before Jaime could reply, but the enthusiasm was contagious. Jaime smiled and turned to Brienne.

She was scowling. “You shouldn’t ask him to do unnecessary things. I’m fine here.”

She was so incredibly irritating. “It’s not unnecessary since making his customers happy is his job. Believe me, he’s been very well compensated. His family won’t worry about food for years, and probably ever if I become a regular buyer. You should know how this works, Brienne.”

He did not mean to snap, but he could not always control his defensiveness around her. He had only wanted to show her some stone.

She frowned, not in disdain, he didn’t think.

“I do know,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

He ran his fingers through his hair. “I want you to see something, but it’s not really important. You don’t have to move. I should have asked first.”

She stared up at him, right as the beeping of the quarry cart sounded outside the door. “I want to see.”

He nodded half-heartedly and did not speak as he helped her down the steps and onto the low, flat bed of the cart. It had no rails and moved very slowly. Jaime knew she would jab at him mercilessly if he gave in to laziness and hopped on beside her, so he walked next to the cart as the manager drove it to the area Jaime had first visited on his own, where the cut slabs were stacked against a quarry wall.

The manager hopped out. “Enjoy this wonderful view! I will return for you when you wish, or you may drive this yourself. Anything you want, Mr. Lannister!” He scurried away down the white-dusted path.

Brienne was scowling again. “Anything you want, Mr. Lannister,” she said, sing-song. It was a friendly insult. He knew that. Other parts of him were not quite sure and only wanted to replay her words in varied tones through his mind.

He stuffed his hand into his pocket and sat on the edge of the cart. She was further back so her leg would be entirely supported. “How does it feel?”

She cleared her throat. “It’s starting to rebel.”

That meant it was extremely painful. Anyone who knew her for five minutes would deduce that.

He spotted a new slab of pink stone, paler along one side. It had been cut along a transitional line and would never sell to a commercial buyer. It was imperfect and blotchy. He liked it quite a bit and considered adding it to his order.

He pointed to it. “What do you see when you look at that?”

He could tell she was trying to form a _right_ answer, not a real answer.

“Tell me exactly what you see. It doesn’t matter if you say a piece of rock, or a toilet. Just tell me.” He didn’t look at her, but her injured foot was within his sight, and he stared at that. The delicate bones around her ankles were obscured by the swelling, but her foot remained strong and interesting.

“I see…I see smoke only pink and not grey. Like a cloud of perfume.”

He looked at the slab and followed the swirls of color, like two liquids flowing together, milk and rosewater. He swallowed thickly, not quite sure why he so wanted to explain. “I see a woman. Her face is hidden, her back to me. She wears a long old-fashioned dress that is pink but sun-bleached in places and frayed around the edges. The lace around her collar has lost all life and is a limp necklace. She holds her left arm behind her back, her fingers clutching something, hiding it from others. I don’t know what she holds. She doesn’t want me to.”

It was too quiet, for too long. He pivoted enough on the edge to look at her. She would think he was crazy.

Her eyes were illuminated by the light, sun bouncing off white stone on all sides. It was as if they existed inside a candle where the flame hovered above. Her lips were parted and more pink than the marble.

“How do you see that?” she asked in a near whisper.

He blinked. “I don’t know.”

She glanced at the slab then back at him. “Show me. Where is her hand, how would you know where to carve?”

He stood gingerly, fingers clenching. Nervous. He moved to the slab not so far away, and raised his hand to rest over a swirl where almost indiscernible grey threads formed shadows amongst the milky white. “Here,” he said. “This is her hand.”

Adopting the pose held by the stone woman, he bent his arm behind his back, looking over his shoulder. “Like this.”

He crouched and glided his fingers near the bottom. “The hem of her dress. You can’t see her shoes, but she’s short and a little hefty.”

Brienne was staring not at the stone but at him when he rose. Her brow was furrowed. She was not angry. She pointed to the next slab in the line. “What is that?”

It was one of the first he’d seen, the one that contained only tourist figurines. He shrugged. “Practice for an amateur. Those overpriced baubles in the gift shops, the replicas.”

She leaned forward to peer at the slab. “How do you see that? How do you know?”

She was wondering aloud and expected no answer, he knew that, but he allowed himself to smile a little at her wonder.

“Which one would make a better backsplash?” he asked. 

He traced the motion of her arm as she pointed to the dull pedestrian slab. “That one, but I don’t know why.”

“It’s boring. That’s why. Too uniform, too free of flaw. Pleasing to look at from an unfocused periphery. Nothing lives in such boredom.”

Her face had come alive. Color flooded her cheeks and lips, her eyes gleaming. “And that one?”

It was the slab that held captive the young peasant girl from Fleabottom. She still smirked, she still had some audacious secret kept at the corner of her thin lips. He explained her identity, how she reveled in her squalid living condition, how she defied pity. He ran his fingers over the stone and explained how he would hold the chisel just so, to release a lock of hair, to form the roughened, worn leather of her boot.

When he turned back to Brienne, she was no longer held captive by the creatures in stone. She was sad. He could see it clearly, a veil lowered over her large features, all independently incredible, all collectively far from remarkable, though he could not lie and claim they did not hold him captive. He did not grasp it, but he knew it’s truth.

“I’m sorry,” she said, so quietly.

“What?”

She leaned a little further forward, dangling her feet over the cart’s edge and wrapping her fingers around one knee. “I am sorry I told you to be better. I didn’t understand. I was callous about your loss.”

It took time to absorb her claims. She pitied him, the worst possible thing. He didn’t want that. He couldn’t look at her.

He heard her sighing. He heard her scrape herself along the cart and stand before he could stop her. She was there next to him when he looked up, acting the flamingo again with one bare foot and sunburnt skin. She should have looked homely and ridiculous. She should have.

She stared at him and then at his stump and then at his hand as his fingers rubbed together to feel the well-known and well-loved grit of stone dust. “You hold the chisel in your left hand.”

He nodded, but began to grimace. He knew where headed, disappointment. “And the hammer was in my right, but no, I can’t do it. The skill is not only in the angle of the chisel but the pressure of the hammer. It must be exactly right, every time, or it’s pointless. I could not control that.” He heard the fierce resentment in his voice too late.

She was silent until the weight of it forced him to look at her. She scowled as fiercely as he felt. “You cannot do it the way you once did. You could not strive for perfection. Then don’t. Just because you can’t create what you once did should not prevent you from creating at all.”

He stared right back. “I would never be satisfied with such sloppy visions.”

“Then _be_ satisfied. Make…make what can be sloppy. Carve the little girl.” She was insistent, relentless.

He scoffed. “Even the laces of her boots are beyond me now.”

“Then she doesn’t have laces, and her shoes can be ugly. Why should that matter? You don’t like her anyway.”

He was somehow exasperated with her but also sinking into a desperate need to believe that what she claimed could be possible. It wasn’t as if he’d never considered it. He’s taken chisel to stone many times, but he could not hammer. It was that simple.

She was staring at his stump. He had been as well; he just hadn’t realized it. He sucked in a breath of shock as she abruptly reached for his arm and lifted it, her strong fingers wrapped around his flesh and the red lumps of his marred skin so near her face that she would see it in its full hideous glory.

If he tugged it away, she might lose her balance. She examined him without pity this time, her eyes scanning for some answer she seemed to believe she’d find. “What if you attached a hammer to a cuff?”

He frowned. “Like a pirate with a hook? You can’t be serious.”

She raised a brow. “Why not?”

The heat of her hands bled into his sensitive flesh. It was growing difficult to bear. “For one thing,” he cleared his throat, “there would be no pressure control.”

“You could learn, refine it. And make abstracts. Make anything. It doesn’t matter. You would know what was inside, and everyone else could see…a shadow.” Still she held his arm. He wanted his hand back, his fingers, so she could slide her thick palms down and tangle their fingers together. He wanted this contact more than he wanted a hammer. He wanted and wanted.

“It will never be the same,” he whispered.

“Of course not,” she said, so kindly. She smiled the same smile she had given to the little manager. He had wanted that too, but perhaps not like this. “It will take time. Years, probably but patience is worth it if you find a way to do what you love.”

He blinked. It was challenging, standing there and hearing the most difficult things, knowing she was very wrong, knowing her more by knowing she was secretly an optimist beneath her cynical defenses. But he wanted. The skin of his stump screamed from the stimulation of raw nerves there, her thumb sliding along a gnarled ridge of skin. He didn’t think she knew she did it. He wanted her. He thought of her more than his stone. He could never have either. He felt violent inside.

The phone inside his pocket rang, and that was the end of his good day.

 

 


	8. A Beautiful Thing Never Gives so Much Pain as Does Failing to Hear and See It

 

 

He was glum. He knew she saw it, and that she did not coax him from it because of the difficult things that had been said next to those taunting stone slabs.

When they returned to the office, Brienne still on the cart, the little manager presented her with a freshly-filled basket of food. She smiled at him, and Jaime bought the swirling pink marble and the slab with the taunting little girl, even though he would do nothing with it. The manager beamed and insisted on driving Brienne straight to the extra-large SUV.

Jaime watched her brows rise first in surprise and then some combination of embarrassment and amusement as she spotted it.

“What a sturdy _car_ ,” she said.

“We’re big people.” He shrugged.

The driver dashed to open the rear doors, and the manager greeted him like an old friend. He likely was in such a small community.

Jaime wrapped his arm around her waist once more, to help her from the cart to the car, and his fingers flexed the _gladness and joy_ of reunion just as the words were spoken between the local men.

She settled back on the plush seat, propping her now-furious foot on the bench opposite. He slid in next to her. The cool air instantly chilled his skin, the contrast between such fabricated winter and the pool of humidity outside too much to allow quick acclimation. He saw pinprick bumps rise on the skin of her arms and longed to run his fingers over them to feel their new texture.

Instead, he opened the box on the bench and found an instant ice pack, squeezing it with his one hand until the middle snapped and it began to numb him. He said some sort of inane greeting as the driver smiled before shutting the doors, the engine soon sounding. Jaime knelt on the carpet for a moment in order to wrap the ice around her ankle. She cringed.

“All right?” he glanced at her face, eyes clouded with pain. “Maybe it’s broken after all.”

She shook her head. “It’s not. I just don’t think trekking did it any favors.”

He tried to smile, wasn’t sure of its success. “Regretting your rejection of the helicopter?”

“Not in my lifetime.” She glared.

He reclaimed his seat and handed her a small bottle. “Take some or it will get worse.”

He watched as she carefully read every word on the bottle of generic painkillers, the only kind the hotel could send along on short notice. He knew she would take exactly the recommended dosage and no more, and no more frequently than advised. If he offered the rum also in his handy box, she would refuse.

The ride was smooth despite the bumpy road, this vehicle nicer than the one he’d previously taken. The nicest the hotel could muster when Lannister money was in play. He made her eat and stared at her blinking eyelids as she succumbed to her weariness. Her hair tangled as her head rolled against the seatback. Her face was towards him. He wanted to rest his own head, filled with conflict and regret, with confusion and elation, and stare at the bridge of her burnt nose and the creases on her bitten lips. He slid down in the seat until the back of his neck was supported, and he did not stare.

He felt himself begin to doze when a slight pressure made itself known against his shoulder. A soft wisp of her hair, a whisper of her breath. He froze as her head sank against his neck. He wanted to push her off roughly, until there was space between his treacherous body and hers. He gingerly eased his arm around her shoulder and wedged himself into the seat’s corner so she would be more comfortable and could recline against him.

Soon, he slept, and he dreamt of blue seas and bluer eyes, and when he woke the driver was opening the doors and Brienne was awake and blushing harder than ever.

 

* * *

 

He sat on the beach, just this side of the damp tideline where the sand was still warmed by the sun overhead. There were no lounge chairs this far out, and he was surprised to learn that enjoyed the feel of this version of nature under his body. It was soft and movable. He dragged his fingers through, drew sparsely-featured figures into it like a clumsy child.

He waited for her there. She would allow no one to help her anymore, and had only agreed to further assistance upon arrival the night before because her ankle truly had become an angry cabbage-colored gargoyle.

He’d supported her in the elevator and pretended he didn’t know where her room was simply by allowing the bellboy to do his job. Brienne had pointed as they moved onto her floor. It wasn’t as if he’d lied. She’d demanded that she be left alone to wash, an act he blocked from his imagination as the imagery constantly developing inside his brain like film in a pan of cool water was growing explicit and difficult to mask. She had stared at him and scowled at him, but had agreed to allow him back to share a simple dinner.

There had been only two chairs at the small table on her balcony. Jaime could have requested another, but he didn’t. Instead, it was such a good solution to have her rest her leg on his knee as they watched the sea waves turn white as darkness painted them. Strange, it had been, to sit on the balcony where he had first seen her. It was wrong, in a way, and in all others, exactly perfect.

He heard her hobbling on the sand behind him, a certain dragging sound accompanying her, and the telltale slap of her sandal. Her shadow stained him grey. He looked up without having to shield his eyes.

“Have you made it worse from the walk?”

“Of course not,” she snorted. “It’s fine.”

She wore a very long skirt, made of some native fabric from far away. It was the wrong color scheme for her. Rust-red and olive green, and ripe orange. She should exist in blue.

Her ankles were revealed, and he could see that her injury was still too swollen to be in any way _fine_. She had replaced the makeshift bandage with a very professional upgrade. He raised his brow up at her. She looked away, sinking onto the sand without putting weight on her left leg at all, her thigh so incredibly strong. She left space between them, a handsbreadth.

“It’s warmer today,” she said.

He bumped her shoulder with his. “You’re wearing a black tee shirt.”

“I didn’t bring many clothes.” She was clearly unembarrassed about it.

“And yet you have a skirt! I never thought you would.” He chuckled to himself and glanced at the clashing length of cloth. How easy it would be to slide higher and scan a stretch of pale calf…

“It was too hard to pull my trousers over the bandage. It was a gift,” she mumbled.

“From a man?” he pushed, still in humor, tinged with envy.

She folded her arms around her bent knees. “From a mother.”

Her tone was serious, faraway, but not dyed black by tragedy. Not the mother of the boy who had liked her, then. The boy who had ruined her enough to send her to the edge of the world.

He was staring, he couldn’t help it. He wanted her to notice and waited until she did, until the blue hypnotists that were her eyes settled on him. She had delicate orbital bones, too, like her ankles.

“What?” she said, not as harshly as she once had.

He cleared his throat. “Why do you speak to me?”

She stared a little then. “Because…sometimes I don’t want to be alone even if I lie to myself that I do.”

He looked away, at the churning sea. “I lie to myself frequently.”

“I know,” she said.

She placed her right palm down on the sand and absent-mindedly sifted through it with agile fingers. She obliterated his crude illustrations without ever seeing them there, leaving nothing but the imprint of her flesh. It made a better picture, a truer artform.

They sat and interrogated one another about the inanities of living, until the sun began to sink and his stomach began to complain about its emptiness.

“Dinner?” he asked, leaning back on his elbows so he could scan the way her shoulder blades flexed beneath her thin shirt.

“Are you going to order bacon?”

“Maybe.”

She stretched forward, and he caught a sliver of skin between the hem of the shirt and the skirt’s waistband. He wanted to run his thumb over it, his tongue. He sat up and brought his knees to his chest.

“I don’t hate bacon,” she said.

He rose abruptly and dusted himself off despite the futility. He held his hand out. He had not touched her since the elevator. She took it, and the index finger of her right hand pressed into the pulse throbbing in his wrist, racing through his veins as if she would sink straight through his skin.

She rose easily and didn’t bother shaking the sand away at all.

“My lady,” he crooked his elbow and said with a cocky grin and a desperate attempt to conceal the fear and lust he felt lurking in his eyes.

She glanced at his offer and then at his face. “Are you serious?”

He let his arm fall. “Fine, I know, you don’t want any help.”

She grimaced until her chin wrinkled into her lip. “Oh, just give it to me.” She grabbed his arm and threaded hers through it, not at all gracefully.

His senses were starved of stimulation. That had to be it, why he would twist everything she said into some tantalizing fodder for his dreams. No, he would not think of those or remember his images of her flesh. Not those.

He led her back to the hotel, and just near the restaurant, a waiter moved toward them and stopped, extending one of the silver trays in Jaime’s direction. “Mr. Lannister, a message for you.”

It was the waiter who had frequently brought welcome tumblers of rum and very unwelcome crimson envelopes. One rested like a pool of blood on the silver. Jaime stared at it, fury building inside, threatening to burst. He had not thought of them, of their sender. Not at all. How dare they appear when _she_ was present?

He felt her looking at him. Her weighty palm that had gently hung near his wrist as her arm wound through his now wrapped around it. The pressure of her touch was grounding like an iron rod in the wet earth of a lightning storm. He pulled a bill from his pocket and exchanged it for the crimson envelope.

The waiter nodded in gratitude and strode away. Jaime stepped forward, slowly so she could match his pace. When he saw one of the restaurant’s tall burning lanterns, he slid the envelope into the basin and kept walking. He harbored no desire to watch it shrivel into ash, to revel in its destruction. He would have told the waiter to stop bringing them and use them as coasters if he weren’t afraid they would be read by someone. Better to banish them himself.

He did not look at Brienne until they found their secluded table and she settled across from him. There were too many chairs, and she did not need to use him as a footstool. Her expression was unsettled, her hands folded over her crisp white napkin on the table.

“I don’t hate her anymore,” he said with no discernible mood. “I don’t care at all.”

He was surprised to feel truth in his claim. He thought he might be lying to _her_ about another her, a brutal creature made of ambition and venom, but he was not lying, and it was the first occasion he could recall when he was _not_. The flavor of his truth was like the finest chocolate flooding over his tongue.

The crease between her brows eased. She saw it, it wasn’t just inside him. She believed him. She took her napkin and placed it on her lap, and began to scan the menu for delicacies he would watch her eat whenever she looked away.

She ordered the Zamettar sampler platter, the one she had refused on that first night. They scraped it clean together and made plans for breakfast.

 

* * *

 

They sat, after another morning of meandering on heated sand, on his balcony, larger and containing more chairs than hers. The waiter bustled to clear their lunch feast of palm-wrapped baked fish. He could eat the buttery flesh because she tore it from the bones for him. She had insisted it was delicious enough to overcome his objections.

She had been right.

His stone arrived from Yeen. He had rented an empty shed from the hotel, and the smaller slabs were wrapped in wool and stacked inside. The massive block could not fit anywhere and rested near the shed on a platform of sturdy pallets. He circled it alone, not removing the cover, not wanting to see it and not understanding why. He locked the door to the shed and returned to her.

That day, as the sun began to blush like her skin, she told him that she was thinking about ways a small hammer could be attached to a leather cuff. She was serious about it. She taunted him about his resources, about how, if he wanted, he could hire the best engineer to find a way. Her confidence tempted him, but he could not quite find the necessary amount of hope to agree.

 

* * *

 

They reclined by a swimming pool, her legs dangling in the water, a day later. They shared a full tumbler of rum. She could not yet hike and was growing antsy, her fingers often tapping against any surface they could find. He felt at ease.

She had brought him her leather belt. She’d reached for his arm without a word, and he’d extended it as she wrapped the belt around and snapped a pencil in half, using her first aid tape to attached the lead end to the belt.

He looked entirely ridiculous, a stump surrounded by a leather strap and a pencil and glaring white tape.

He laughed about it, wiggling his arm up and down to watch the pencil flop flaccidly. “And what it this meant to do?” He couldn’t stop chuckling.

She turned red and angry. “Nothing _yet_! I’m testing theories.”

He attempted to regain composure. He failed. “I don’t think this one is going to work.”

She wrinkled her nose and yanked the contraption off. “I can see that.”

That day, she swam in the pool and did not hide herself from him. He could not join her in daylight or he would betray himself and frighten her, and lose her. She told him about a village she’d seen once, where there was an ancient fountain made of stone the color of vanilla pods. She said greenish black, and he pressed until he knew the exact shade. He told her about his mother.

 

* * *

 

They walked along the beach, another day later, and another, and another. She made him practice sketching in the sand. He made her drink more rum.

He asked her how long she was staying. She said she didn’t know. He told her he had called his university the morning after she was injured. He told her he had taken a sabbatical because he could not force his mind to return to the oppression of a talentless studio, not for some time. Not when this place he wandered with her contained so much color and the electric vim of jungle life.

Not when she was still there. He did not say that part aloud.

That day, she told him about her dead brother. He told her about his father.

 

* * *

 

They lay next to one another on the dark sand, the moon still silver, still a glowing silver sphere spattered with scars of age-old violence. The water reflected the metallic sky as if drops of molten metal fell one by one and formed a calm pool in the bay that was now their swimming spot. She loved to swim at night, and he loved to watch her while bobbing in the water with ever decreasing difficulty.

She told him the children’s story about the moon being an egg. They imagined how people in the cities would react if the moon were to crack open, right down the jagged middle and release a horde of fire-breathing dragon beasts that would swoop down and reign terror. They laughed about that for a long while.

She told him about roses. Why she hated them. He gripped her hand and folded every finger in between hers, and clutched it hard. She was stiff and in pain. He told her he hoped the man were dead. The vehemence of his tone startled her, and she stared for some time.

 

* * *

 

They sat at their table in the restaurant. She prodded him forward as he drew a terrible interpretation of a seabird on the clean white tablecloth. She chastised him for his choice of materials, but it was too late, and he grinned.

She told him she had a new assignment somewhere near Vaes Dothrak.

He froze in his too-small chair, the abrupt force of his pen wounding the seabird and making it bleed black ink. He looked at her, finally, his chest tight, his lungs panicked. Her face was calm, her lips an even line, her brows an even match.

Her eyes were the storm over churning waves. She blinked. She blushed, despondent red blood rushing under her skin to betray her state of mind.

“Quit,” he said, demanding. Pleading.

She shook her head so carefully, every sliver of motion controlled.

He swallowed. “There are people here who probably need help.”

She smiled. It was rueful and kind and snide. “There are people everywhere who need help, Jaime.”

He filtered through his mad thoughts, struggling for logic, grasping for some comprehensible reason to persuade her to stay with him in this verdant wilderness. A reason other than _want_.

He found nothing. He was no reason to leave a life behind.

“When?” he asked, rigid. Unforgiving.

“A week,” she replied, biting her lower lip until the red turned dark and cruel.

“A week,” he repeated. He had a week of her.

He knew it would happen. He knew that his addiction to her would at some far-off unthinkable moment in time, pierce him and make him bleed. He had known, so he had been careful not to touch her too much, not to swim too close in the water so their slick bodies would brush. A foolish thing, to think he had succeeded in achieving safety.

Her balcony, it should be torn apart until it rained concrete down upon the sand. All traces of her should be obliterated. He wished he’d never seen her, thought her his muse, become so fiercely attached to her raw-bitten lips, her ugly large body, her keen mind. Her radiant sapphire eyes. Her sarcasm, her wit. Her pity. Her blush that made him painfully hard. Her laugh. Her cruel beauty.

That night, he told her about the crimson envelopes. Who sent them, why. What had happened and when. How he had lost his hand. How he had died inside. How he bled from it every day until she appeared on her balcony.

He did not look at her as he rose and strode with imperious confidence through the hotel, up to his room where he savagely jerked the glass doors closed and ripped the curtains across to block the moon that was hers. He smelled of her, the room smelled of her. He could never rid himself of her. He did not wish to do so despite the hatred boiling inside him. Not of her, never. Of him.

He sank onto his bed, staring at the ceiling.

He didn’t have to do that. He could have been gracious, grateful. He could have complimented her on her perpetual kindness toward undeserving humanity. He could have been pleasant and funny. He could have reached for her hand, and maybe coaxed her to let him take it. He could have kissed her. He could have let her leave him with an opinion, if not _good_ then not this.

How cruel his love of her. How vicious his pain.

 

 


	9. From this Mad Passion which Made Me Take Art for an Idol and a King, I have Learnt the Burden of Error

 

He did not sleep, and he did not dream. Or rather, he did not allow himself to sleep so treacherous dreams of her would not plague him in explicit affront. Instead, he exhausted himself and thought of her still, small bolts of recent memory piercing his armor.

To keep his mind under some sad semblance of control, he drew. On the hotel stationary, bleeding seabirds. On the white cocktail napkins, crashing waves. On the pillowcases, a length of thigh, the arch of a foot, the bow of a collar bone. All in stiff, uneven lines which would not pass inspection in a primary school art course.

His hand cramped from the now unfamiliar motions of artistry. He flexed it and brushed a finger under his nose to stifle an itch. Lemongrass and vanilla. He rattled the room table as he rose, stalking around and gathering all the accumulated soaps and tiny bottles, viciously stuffing them into the bottom of a trash bin. The cold water of the shower distracted him, for two or three moments at least, as he washed with whatever he’d brought along in his bag. Tyrion had given him the travel set, scented with sandalwood. It was a rich and masculine aroma. It felt cheap on his skin though he knew it was likely the most expensive thing Tyrion would have found. Lannisters only bought the most expensive.

It did not feel right, to smell of _before_. He hated it. He wanted to dig in the bin for the hotel soap and shower once more, but he knew he would succumb to sensorial agony and repeat the cycle until he scrubbed his clean away.

The bed was clean and empty, the pillows thrown on the floor once he shook the cases free. He lay down, prone and naked, and he accepted what he would see when he slept and how it would feel.

 

* * *

 

He jolted awake. This time, not from the unbearable falsehood of her nearness, but from a harsh clanging near his head.

She had been holding his stump as they sat across from one another on the beach. She was not naked, neither was he, but he shifted to rest his head on her wide lap, and he slept there.

The telephone demanded attention a second time. He fumbled for it, almost knocking it over. Must be something about the marble, or his bill…

He mumbled into the receiver.

“I want to speak to you.”

He sat up, forgetting his was in no physical position to do so without entangling himself in the cotton. He slid off the bed with a harsh plop onto the floor.

She sounded angry, her syllables packed in crisp boxes.

He swallowed the bile of night and the fear rising in his throat. “Why?” It was a whisper; it was a plea.

“I suppose you’ll find out when you bother to appear. It’s three in the afternoon. I haven’t got all day.”

Had she expected him to be waiting in the restaurant as had become their habit? They ate bacon and toast for breakfast, and she had two eggs and he a large waffle covered in sugary syrup.

Had she _waited_ for him?

He hopped to his feet, sweet anticipation awakening his blood, though he knew she could only want to reply to his vile narration of the previous evening with some sort of hurt or disappointment. Betrayal.

“Where?” he breathed through gritted teeth.

“Our table,” she said, and she ended the call.

 _The scene of battle_ , he thought. Where he had wounded her.

He dressed in whatever was draped over the nearest chair. He brushed his teeth and washed the grit from his eyes, and that was all. There was no time to be presentable.

He did not wait for the elevator, taking the stairs three at a time until he burst out of the stolid building and into the palm-filled serenity of the restaurant. He felt anything but serene. She was there, in the chair that was hers, with her green trousers and black shirt, and sandals. The indentation of laces was not impressed into the delicate skin of her feet. She had not visited the jungle yet, and did not intend to that day.

He did not meet her gaze as he sat, but he felt it upon him as if it had mass and form and judgment. He cleared his throat. Still he could not manage words.

“Have you moved on from bacon?” she asked in a withering tone.

Finally, he looked at her, scowling as was her wont, the corners of her lip twisted quite magnificently. All he wanted was to press his mouth against hers.

He shook his head.

He did not know what tale his features told. He was not their master then. Whatever lurked there, it caused her eyes to darken, widen. Her fingers to twitch against the table as she rested her wrist on the edge.

She parted those twisted lips, considering words, weighing phrases. Likely condemnation.

“Tell me why you have never mentioned the scholarships.” It was a clear order from a knowing commander.

She had _researched_. He had never wanted her to do so. There were so many lies, almost only lies. And rumors of truths that most thought were the lies. Now she knew how to tell the difference, but there would be nothing flattering either way. Why, of all the things she should have learned, did she ask of this?

She did not wait for him to question her. She knew he would. “Is it true that you fund your university’s entire art program and grant scholarships for the most promising students?”

He sneered. “It’s my legacy. I have nothing else.”

She leaned toward him, fury contorting her ruddy features. “That’s not why you do it.”

“You know that, do you? How certain you are.” He glanced away, her nearness intolerable.

“I am certain,” she spoke, so softly it was near a whisper, so confident and generous. 

His eyes could not stray from her for long. He shook his head, powerless against the force of her will. “Art is…the soul. It is selfish and obsessive. It is the judge of all other things. It’s what we leave behind.”

Her arm extended so slightly forward, but she halted the motion. She blinked. He could not stop staring at her eyes. “You do not want to be forgotten,” she said.

 _I don’t care,_ he said in his mind. _I am nothing_ , he said to himself. “You see? Selfish. Obsessive,” he said to her. “But then, I am not a good man.”

She sat back, strangely at ease, never wavering in her gaze. Her words were honey swirling into the heat of tea, the fresh mist of night rain left on jungle flowers. “You are a good man who has done things that are not good.”

He scoffed. “How is that different?”

“It’s entirely different,” she persisted, playing this strange game of arguing about his character with its master.

“I’d love to hear how you know that,” he countered.

She looked down, the first time. The blush he had missed dearly in so short a time arrived, ivy climbing a wall, lovely, pure, temporal. The specter of his lost hand was there to caress its path, because there was no danger in such fantasy.

“You are good to me,” she murmured. “Very few are.”

How could anyone be unkind to this most selfless of women? He thought of roses, and though he could not imagine such base cruelty tossed at her, he knew her tale had been truth. She suffered. She knew the cut of a callous word, the bite of a scornful gaze.

His words shook with the weight of his thoughts. “You are the best person in this wretched world.”

Her downturned gaze snapped up. She contemplated him. “You are still very blind.”

His head shook with the weight of the truth he spoke. “I am not.”

She folded one long arm at the elbow to rest her chin on the heel of her hand. “I think that maybe we are both blind.”

He wanted to smile, but did not allow it. It was too hopeful a display. “Then what are we to do about that?”

The blue of her eyes lightened, sparkled. “Swim. Walk along the beach. Bother the gulls. Eat bacon.”

He did smile, a little. It was air and new and good.

Her face was so familiar now, forming itself in his memory upon a moment, a catalog of her freckles embedded in his thoughts. He blinked to cleanse himself of illicit images building inside, but she was still there, her lips pleading for his touch, her skin glowing in the light.

“Why do you speak to me?” he asked, unable to conceal the flickers of his prior anguish.

Her lips twisted into half a scowl. “Sometimes, I know, and sometimes, I don’t.”

He cleared the sand that had gathered in his throat. “I drew things all last night. They were terrible.”

“Then make them better,” she demanded.

That night, she told him how she had always wanted a dog. He told her about the four dogs he’d had as a child. She joked that he should have saved one for her. He said he would have given her the best one had he known she existed. She said he was full of nonsense and that he would never have spoken to her then. He disagreed. She said she was barely born when he had already lost interest in childhood fancies. They argued long after the moon faded from silver to steam grey.

 

* * *

 

They sat in the bar the next afternoon. She had found a sketchpad somewhere, and she watched his attempts to form coherent shapes. She said she was shocked at how good he was with his wrong hand. He knew she did not lie, but also that she did not understand the poverty of his current skill compared to the wealth of his old.

That night, they talked of her work and where she had been.

 

* * *

 

They ate only her flapjacks and some fruit for breakfast, because she could hike again and wanted to find a certain stretch of beach where the water was supposed to be crystal clear straight to the bottom.

That night, they laughed at the war wounds of a sand flea attack, and Jaime watched as she covered her calves in healing cream. She asked if he wanted some. He said no.

 

* * *

 

They evolved.

 

* * *

 

There was a storm that sent cascades of heated water drops down on their uncovered heads. No one else was on the beach, lacking fortitude to endure a bath dictated by nature. Her hair was plastered against her neck, her clothes clinging to her form. She had not worn white. He was both grateful and highly disappointed.

That night, they lounged together by a fire on the beach. The storm had passed, leaving a bleeding sunset that transformed into a night sky of flickering white stars and the distant shadows of clouds reflecting moonlight. They ate nibbles they roasted on skewers of palm wood, most burned and turned to fluttering black ash. Some were luscious. She popped a piece of plantain coated in chocolate into his mouth. It was guileless and friendly. He licked the tip of her finger on purpose as she moved away. She did not react. She had not noticed.

He could not taste her because of the chocolate. His body wildly thrummed, and his heart thudded deep within his chest. Mostly because she was meant to leave in two days’ time. He felt like stone. He felt confined and immovable. He would not think of it. He would only look at her face.

 

* * *

 

He knew he was not himself. He could see that she knew why, and but they did not mention it. He did not finish his breakfast.

They walked and swam that day, the same as always, and took their meals, and sat on the beach. She liked the sunset best because there was light enough to see, but it was not so hot nor so bright. He liked it best because the tangerine light flooded her hair with gilded streaks, and bathed her skin in soft gauze.

He sketched her. Thin lines here and there, to form a piece of her whole. He was getting better. He was far from good.

She objected nearly every time he wanted to draw her when she was with him, but he argued that he would draw her regardless, and didn’t she want him to work on his skill with his wrong hand? She had given up.

She reclined on the beach with her elbows propping her up. She wore her skirt. He had not asked why, because he knew that she had sent most of her clothes off for cleaning, so they would be ready to pack the next day. They did not speak of it.

He eased the soft lead of his pencil along smooth paper, trying so hard to mimic the curve of her ankle. He could not get it right, probably never would, but it felt urgent somehow. If he could only capture her ankle, the first of her he’d ever seen, he could keep the image with him. Keep her with him. Foolish, childish make-believe.

He grumbled and tossed the pencil into the sand. It landed near her elbow, and she looked over at him.

“You give up too easily,” she said.

Whenever she challenged him, he wanted to prove her wrong, that he _could_ do better, draw better. Be a better man. But what was the point when she would be gone. He shrugged only one shoulder and looked off toward the darkening sea.

The pencil landed in his lap. “Do it again.”

He glared at her. He scrawled on a new white sheet and held it up to face her.

She cocked her head in mock contemplation. “I can’t quite tell…is that a cooked goose or your middle finger?”

He narrowed his eyes, but he couldn’t quite prevent the corners of his lips from tilting slightly upward. “My hand is tired.”

“Excuses, excuses. Again.” She moved to lay on her side with her hand supporting her head, facing him.

The distribution of her weight in the sand created a new shape, or rather, a shape that belonged to her but had not yet appeared. The curve of her hip became more pronounced, the indentation of her waist creating a resting place just the size of his palm. Her neck lengthened, the muscle of one calf rounded as it rested half on her other outstretched limb. Her toes dug into the sand absentmindedly. The luminescence of the waves at night reflected in her eyes.

He swallowed, so weary of fighting the pull of her body. So frightened of its loss. His gaze flowed over her like the tide. If she remained in that pose for a moment longer, he would rise to his knees and crawl over her, and press his weight against her, and lower his mouth to her. Anywhere, in any spot. He didn’t care.

He had not set his pencil to paper. She scowled. “Draw.”

He shook his head and gestured to her ankle. “Stand up. I can’t see.”

“You’re drawing me again? Find a bird.”

He raised his brows. “You told me to get better and to try again. That’s what I was drawing, ergo, I must draw it again to get better.”

She stared at him and humphed, but she quickly rose and stood in front of him in the boxiest, most savage stature possible.

He craned his neck to meet her gaze. “You know I’m going to make you move.”

She raised her arms a little and dropped them to slap her thighs. “Fine. Where do you want me?”

Everywhere. Anywhere. _Here_.

He looked down and pointed to the sand near his knee where his sketchpad rested. “Right foot just here, parallel to me.”

She moved, and then she was too close. This was supposed to be a _less_ dangerous arrangement. The hem of her long skirt was still damp from their earlier walk in the shallows. She never cared about things like that, or how her clothes would smell of seaweed. They would wash, she always said.

She never smelled that way, always just fresh like the air over the sea, or sweet and green like the stunning chlorophyll inside palm fronds. Or lemongrass and vanilla.

He shouldn’t…he had to. “Pull the skirt up.”

“No.”

He glanced up, knowing how dark his eyes were and hoping she would attribute it to focus. “Just a little.”

Never did she comply without significant peevishness, and the sounds of her snorting grumbles formed a soundtrack to the action of her bunching the fabric of her skirt between her fingers and yanking it higher. She pulled more than they both intended. That was fine with him.

He scanned her translucent skin, from half-buried toes, to gently curved arch, sturdy heel to that tantalizing delicate ankle. Higher then, the outward sweep leading to the muscle of her leg, tensed and perfect. He felt the fixation to capture her. Bind her to his page.

He dragged the lead over the paper, a delicate arc, barely any pressure. It was not right, not yet.

“Stand on your toes,” he said so quietly he was not sure she heard.

She hesitated for a moment, but she lifted her heel. The skin of her arch puckered, the tendon at the back of her ankle compressed. The calf tensed. He swallowed. She was too close. He would risk it.

“No, I can’t get the angle. Put your foot on my knee.” He sat back a bit, picked up the sketchpad to leave room.

She did not move, and when he glanced up, she glared. “This is uncomfortable.”

He purposely mistook her meaning and felt no remorse. “It’s only for a minute.” He stared at her, pled with her in silence.

She looked away, blinking too frequently as she eased her toes from the sand and rested her foot on his body. He felt her weight sink into him. Her knee was bent now.

He drew another line, and it was not perfect, but it was all right. It would do. Another line, two more. Three. Her supple limb began to take shape, the most rudimentary tribute, and he felt himself become distant, mind apart from body under the thrall of his craft. It was as if he had regained his hand for one solitary moment. The light had shifted already. A new angle, a different shadow…he did not think when he placed the pencil behind his ear, and wrapped his hand around her calf to settle his subject in a slightly different pose.

He had not touched her in too long. He froze, his palm cradling the muscle of her calf, his fingers wrapped around and digging slightly into her pure flesh. The shadows they made were fascinating. His grip on her consuming. He stared at the places where their skin merged.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, startled, afraid.

He did not know. He sketched her to keep her, but the act did not instigate those familiar feelings. Neither satisfaction nor frustration directed at the creation of his mind and hands. He could not answer her. He loosed his hand and slid it higher, only a little. The roughened skin of his fingertips glided along the smoothness of her flesh, his thumb circling that tender place behind her knee.

He heard her sharp intake of breath the instant before she twisted her limb from his grasp and took far too many steps back.

“What are you doing?” she repeated, in a near-shout this time.

 _Let her see,_ he begged himself, terrified and electrified and whole.

He looked at her, at the face that was not at all beautiful but the face he loved most in the world. He looked at her body that was too _much_ for that world to appreciate, and he wanted it so badly he nearly shook. He looked at her eyes, those mirrors of her true soul that was beauty and light and good. He loved them above all.

He let her see these things unconcealed.

She did not understand. Her brows drew together, her lips parted, her blue beauty glazed with threatening water. “What do you want?” she said so softly in her low voice that he would not have heard it if not for the obliging breeze.

He rose from the sand. His fingers clenched into a fist by his side, but he did not stuff them into his pocket to conceal his body’s will. “You.”

She was silent, she swallowed thickly, she shook her head. “You don’t.”

“Don’t tell me what I want.” His voice was gentle.

“Then don’t lie.” She pleaded, one more step back.

“I have never lied to you,” he said, enormously grateful that his claim was true. “That’s why I’m an ass.”

She kept shaking her head, the motion not at all vehement, not at all sure. He had a chance, then, didn’t he? He could try.

He stepped close to her, not enough to touch her, but enough for her to feel the heat of his body. “See the stone, let me show you my muse.”

She stood still, a statue herself, her lips slowly sealing and her eyes turning distant like inlays of solid lapis. She nodded. Her posture was all confidence and challenge. He did not understand.

But she had accepted. He would show her, allow her to know all that he had hidden from her.

He extended his hand. She did not take it. She marched forward at a merciless clip, toward the hotel. Her sandals lay on the sand near his sketchpad. He retrieved them all, filling his only hand with things both vital and mundane.

He was used to her stride, knew the exact length to make his in order to catch her, the exact amount of time it would take. They arrived at the corner of the hotel at the same time, the left path leading to the storage area where the stone was kept, and the right to the entrance. She looked first one way then the other. He did not wait. If he let her linger too long, she was likely to seek the solitude of her suite, and he did not think she would let him in if he knocked. She was frightened. She did not believe him. Yet _._

Only the moon illuminated the palm-surrounded utility area. It was stark and displeasing to the eye, sheds lining either side of a central dirt path. He had the furthest one, the last on the left, and his block of marble was as he had seen it last, wool-covered and forbidding.

He did not check to see if she stood there. He dropped her sandals and his sketchbook. He rushed forward and began to unbind the heavy nylon securing the blanket, so many buckles and knots for a one-handed man, but he managed.

He pulled the wool away, dragging it into a dusty heap near the stone. Grit coated his fingers, familiar and unwanted as it covered the skin had that touched her. The silver of the moon reflected off the marble, casting its immediate realm in soft radiance.

She was bathed in half-darkness. He could not see her eyes. He knew she could hear him. The side of the marble block facing her was the side that had been cut, exposing the unspoiled freckled white within, surrounded by ugly grey.

“I saw you,” he said. “On your balcony. I watched you from above. I saw your ankle first, only. I knew it was _you_. I saw your legs. I thought they were stunning. I thought you were a muse, so I chased you, because a muse is meant to be chased and never caught. Not really. I wanted a fantasy. They are safe. They can’t cause pain.”

He looked at the face of the marble where he had envisioned her body slowly taking shape. He stepped near it, reached his right hand out to draw the shapes, so she could see. He forgot he had no hand there, so he used his stump, because it did not frighten her and he did not have the luxury of time to care.

“Here, this convergence of alabaster and blush…that’s the base of your neck, seen from the left and just in front. Here, your shoulder. Down, where you see this line? Your waist, twisted so slightly in movement.” He crouched to explain the most important part. “And here, you see this swirl? Your ankle bone. The first thing I saw, the first thing I knew in this stone. I would take a chisel, right there, gently, and begin. It would come to life, your stone twin, part by part until I freed her. She would live forever.”

He stood and looked to her. Her eyes glistened, lips twisted. He could see no further detail in the poor light.

“She is not real,” he said, vehemently, pleadingly. “You are real. You are no fantasy. You can cause me terrifying pain. You are a danger to my being. If I had my hand, both hands, she would be the best creation of this age. She would command wonder. She would not ever be you.”

She was silent. She did not move. For a time.

Then, she stepped softly forward, her feet naked and silent, and she in shadow slowly circled the block of stone. The light reflecting off the stone began to bathe her, first her hand, then her arm, her shoulder, her neck, the side of her face, all. Her skin was the color of the marble, her freckles the same shade of burnt orange, her veins shone through like the veins of the lifeless muse.

The muse did not part her plush red lips. The muse did not blink to shield the marvel of bluest eye.

She stared at the glowing stone. She lifted her long fingers and dragged them over it. She flattened her palm as if to feel a heartbeat. He watched her, waited.

“Where is my face?” she whispered.

He looked at his so-precious block, he laughed. “I never saw your face in this. It knew better. It can’t match you.”

“You only see parts,” she said, almost to herself.

He moved, he had to. He stepped in front of her, in front of the marble. “Not anymore. I only see you. I _know_ you.”

She seemed lost in her mind, she only blinked and pressed her lips tightly together.

“Come here,” he said, even though he was close enough that he could raise his hand and place it on her chest, and feel the rushing blood of her living heart.

She began to shake her head. He wasn’t sure if it were refusal or defense.

“Come here and tell me I’m lying,” he demanded.

Those eyes he loved so well stared at him, at his face, his self. She wavered as if to take a step, but did not progress. A chain had sprouted from the stone and bound her there.

How surreal it was, to watch her there beside the prison of her shadow self, her unworthy mimic. How lovely to see her lend her color to the lifeless stone, her skin radiant, her body solid, substantive. Real.

He moved. He pressed his body to her body, his palm to her neck, his lips to her mouth.

He was not gentle. It was not his nature, he did not know how. He did not want to be. He kissed her as if lost in battle, a desperate man in fear of being consumed, only it was too late. His senses were at war with one another. He could not absorb the onslaught of her scent, the silk of her skin beneath his fingers, his lips, the sound of her sharp breaths, the weight of her body pulsing against him.

There was a burning on his side, a trail of fire, her fingers risen to settle there for an instant, trailing higher, to his shoulder. Her lips slid against his, her arms wound around his neck, he was lost.

He cradled her head in his palm because of the unforgiving stone behind her. He wrapped his arm around her waist, the hideous stump pressed into her back beneath her shirt.

She clung to him, he claimed her mouth in a new dance more satisfying than any other. She lifted her leg and rested her foot against the stone. Her thigh grazed his hip, as it had in his dreams so impoverished of authenticity. His desire for her was sweet, demanding, pain.

He lifted his mouth and pressed his open lips to her cheek, her jaw, the velvet beneath her ear, her neck, its base where he branded her with his tongue.

She froze. He felt her pulse racing beneath his mouth, her fingers twitching against his neck. She lowered her leg, slid her arms down like taunting serpents, wilted against the stone and did not look at his face.

He dropped his hand from her neck but did not let her go. He grazed his fingers down her arm, gripped her hand, lifted it. Twined their fingers together. “You don’t believe me still.”

“I…” she choked on her intent, almost inaudible. “You place me on a pedestal. You turn me into fantasy. I’m not what you think I am.”

He shook his head with fervor. “I will not allow you to lie to yourself.” He pushed his hips against her. “If you will not believe my words, believe my body. It doesn’t lie.”

She sucked in a breath and closed her eyes, as if she would have lain back on the marble if she could. There was dew coalescing in the corner of her eye like morning rain on palm leaves.

He placed her hand on his chest, flattened it and covered it with his. He only hoped the racing of his heart would sway her. “I want you,” he said with all the truth in his speeding blood.

“You can’t,” she whispered.

Stubborn beast, willfully blind. “You think too much,” he said

“You think too little.” She looked at him, finally, accusing and petrified.

“I’m not allowed to love you, then?” he nearly shouted. “Is that it? You have decided that after every truth I’ve spoken, I lie about the most terrifying, honest thing in my life?”

Her lips parted quickly, but he could not stomach a confirmation of her doubt and rushed on. “You cannot deny it. _I_ won’t allow that.”

Once more, she was frozen, a sculpture of ice and flesh, her hand over his heart both barrier and bridge between them.

He stared. He lifted his hand and ran his thumb over her swollen lip. He kissed her so softly it was barely real, then more, then more and harder. “I want you,” he said. “I love you.”

The dew became a stream, thin and salt and fear there in the corners of her eyes. Her cheeks dampened. His fingers dampened. His heart leadened in his chest. She was ice, he was stone.

“Let me go,” she begged, but there was no heart in it. It was not as if she couldn’t push him away whenever she pleased. And she hadn’t.

He blinked, too much, too rapidly, couldn’t catch his breath. “I can’t.”

She closed her lips tightly, turned down at the corners. Eyes glossy, mirrors of misery.

He stepped away. Her touch was his downfall. Her hand lingered in the space where his heart had been, for a fleeting moment before dropping to her side with the weight of her plea.

He lowered himself to sit on the heap of wool with knees drawn up and arms draped over them with no grace. He could not stand anymore. He could not feel his body, detached and distant. He wanted to find a pickaxe and take it to the block of stone, savagely, brutally, chipping it away until it was nothing. He wanted to sink it in the bottom of the sea, to prove that it was nothing. It _was_ nothing. She was everything, and every reminder of her, every chip of that devastated stone would never truly leave him.  

Her shadow crossed over him, blocking the moon. She passed slowly around, no slap of sandal, only the soft rustle of cloth as she walked.

She was somewhere behind him when she stopped. He waited, listened, drowned.

“Give me time,” she said.

And there was no more rustle. There was no more.

 

 


	10. I Saw the Angel in the Marble and Carved Until I Set Her Free

 

 

Raw, rough-hewn, ugly was the thing creeping its way from inside the stone. It had no face, it’s skin mottled from careless chisel’s violence. An effluvium of painful words poured as air from stone lips to stone’s surface. The stone man bent over kneeling limbs in worship or despair.

Jaime did not know which. It changed by the day. He had made the man from a block of stone the pale grey of a blooming storm, cut from the quarry’s wall in the place near the womb of _her_ stone. The man was him.

He peered at the heavy block, low to the white-dusted floor. It had just come back on the ship from Astapor with the wrappings of its previous air journey from the King’s Landing National Museum still intact.

How stupid, he thought, to spend so much in order to display such a wretched thing. _The Broken Man_ he called it, because they always needed names, his creations. All things needed names.

It had won an award. It was the worst thing he’d ever done, the hastiest, the most desperate. He had not done it to practice his pitiful skill, nor to liberate a worthy power from a lovely block. He had done it in a numb sort of hope that she might see.

He had carved, too, the rudest version of the woman in the pink dress with the secret in her palm. The smarmy young girl from Fleabottom that he did not still and never would like. A bleeding seabird. A broken man.

She had not been wrong. Not entirely. He’d had a cuff made of tempered steel with a strange nub of iron near the end. It was his hammer now. He could barely control pressure, could hardly refine a vein nor produce the smooth surface of a silky patch of skin, not without ages and rum enough for patience.

And he’d covered the steel in fine gold. The cuff’s natural reflection of silver reminded him of moonlight over a calm dark pool, of translucent pale skin…it was not a labyrinth of thought he could endure.

He simply waited.

 

* * *

 

“Mr. Lannister, gladness and joy, Mr. Lannister!” Mero rushed in with his pudgy arms full of tourist trinkets.

They were the products of the newer students, sold in Mero’s little shop on the beach to showcase the stunning Yeen marble. Jaime glanced at the pile and nodded.

Mero furrowed his brow, though the little manager never ventured into a territory even adjacent to dismay. “You do not wish to approve of these?”

Jaime smirked a little. “You know they’re always the same.”

Mero nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, because it is the best marble.”

Jaime returned the nod. “Of course it is.”

Mero beamed and shuffled away, leaving Jaime alone once more.

It was true, the marble was the best. It had not taken many months for the beauty of Yeen’s greatest, Yeen’s _only_ , export to become known and coveted. The stone masters of Braavos and Volantis, and of his homeland, had gathered in Zamettar like a small but mighty horde, overflowing pocketbooks clamoring for attention. Jaime owned them all, for he owned all the stone.

That was the first thing he had done, _after_. Once he had awakened and had been stunned by the realization that he only had to wait, he was not lost. Broken, yes, but that was no novelty. He waited, and he acquired the entire quarry in Yeen from the little manager Mero and his brother who remained in exactly the same positions with exactly triple the pay.

Mero had no need to interact with the students perpetually bent over white-dusted tables, to stock the beach shop or greet tourists there, but he enjoyed those things and was far friendlier than Jaime ever would be. Jaime mostly could ensconce himself in the rear of the large studio he’d built, the students in the front, and he in his own forbidden space where he could attack his stone at will or stare at it with a tumbler of rum in his hand, a chest so tight he could hardly breathe, and the corners of his eyes pinched in suspicious treachery. When the waiting was a taunting mistress.

Her stone was there in the corner. It was often covered by a heavy costume of smooth blue cloth, when he could not look at it or he would only look at it. He kept the bottom covered always, because of what he sometimes did with his most valued chisel and his prosaic hammer. When he wondered where she was because he did not know.

He did not realize how he stared at the stone even then. It was a strange thing, to look at it and fail to see what first he had seen. The magnetic life within, the perfection, the beauty. He did not want that. Perhaps that was why he could rarely see it any longer.

The skin of his stump was chafed and caked in that fine chemistry of sweat and stone dust when he removed his cuff and its leather lining. He denied himself the addictive pain of lonely memory, flicking the studio light off and climbing the narrow staircase to his apartment above.

She would be surprised, he knew, at the sparsity of his quarters. There was room enough but an obvious lack of the luxury his name would demand. No surrounding comforts were worth his investment. It was a box in which to house a man, the only thing of interest a large map tacked to one wall. It was cheap and tatty, bright colors twisting the beauty of seas into flat childish shapes, the topography of states into distorted masses with jagged edges. With tiny pins, he had marked the places she’d gone. Ten pins in ten months. The number of his fingers before his loss. The number of times they’d bathed in the cool bay under the moon. The number of months since.

He’d pushed the last pin savagely through the thin map, straight into the wall in a motion that obliterated Bayasabhad. He’d lost her there.

She wasn’t dead, that he knew. He believed he would have known somehow even without the intense enquiry he’d bought. The sea would have told him, the moon, his own blood. At least she was not dead, even if his every waking moment was flavored with a profound unease over her whereabouts, her wellbeing. He denied it to himself, of course. Because he only _waited_ , but there were times, days, when the ticking of the clock grew wearisome, hateful. He had not seen her in twenty months and four days. He knew it exactly and could not stop himself from knowing. He could always count as he waited.

It had taken all the powers of his name to ensure her safety. He’d donated to the relief organization in order to gain access to its directors. He’d found out where she would be sent, could provide enough supplies, enough bodies so she would not be in undue danger. He did not think Bayasabhad would be so terrible. There was nothing to warn him or he would have risked her wrath and purchased her immediate passage elsewhere.

That had been the only time he’d left Zamettar. When he’d gone to Bayasabhad to find her. There had an uprising, unexpected and bloody. She was not amongst the casualties; she was not aiding the survivors. She was no longer there at all. He’d hired the best people, and looked himself, and all he knew was that she had been airlifted to Asshai, then Meereen, then King’s Landing. She had disappeared amongst the manmade wastes where he could not find her.

Jaime sank onto his too-small sofa, limbs tense, mind sprinting, spirit weary. It was not wise to be still. In action, he could fool himself into momentary peace, but never in stillness. He rose so quickly he was almost light-headed. He showered, roughly scrubbing his skin as he enveloped himself in lemongrass and vanilla.

The sensation of her thigh against his hip had not faded, as if it were a brand. Perilous to think on it, impossible to evade. He leaned against the smooth tile of the shower and rested his head and closed his eyes. If he were motionless, silent, if he stood just there in the humidity and the swarming redolence of her soap, he could imagine for one lovely moment that she was there.

It was worth the subsequent resurgence of suffering. It was always worth it.

He dressed in loose jogging pants. The knees were wearing down. Tyrion would mock them mercilessly, but Jaime no longer cared. He would not care about running at all, but he didn’t want her to think he’d gotten lazy when she…he would at least be presentable.

He liked to run at night when the tourists were past inebriated beach combing and had taken up slurred argumentation at the bar. He moved to the front of the apartment which faced the beach. He’d had a narrow balcony built so he could watch the sea as he done before, as he had done with her. The moment immediately after dusk faded into night, when the moon was high over the water, the space between the white-foam waves and the black depths was the color of her eyes.

He moved onto his balcony and rested his elbows on the railing. There was the sea, but he had missed his glimpse, too late in the studio that evening. The sand of the beach was made brighter by a full moon. Silver illuminated crystal shards of broken shell, the line of incoming tide, the scampering life of crab and bird.

A mop of blonde tangling in easy wind. An expanse of lucent skin. A graceful neck, a muscled arm, a strong back, the shape of her as crisp as memory. She sat on the sand with knees drawn to her chest and arms wrapped around. She faced the sea and did not look at him. He doubted she knew he was there, watching as he always had, but she would know the structure behind her was his. Everyone in Zamettar knew, and she was _there_ , right in front.

He considered these things, mundane, pedestrian reasonings, because they were safety. If he forced them to occupy his overawed mind, he could not contemplate how his hand was flooded with pain from its punishing grip on the railing. He could not contemplate the dizzying pace of the blood coursing through him to pound within his heart, the sudden desert waste that was his throat, the arduous clenching of his jaw.

He was not certain if she were real. This was the problem in conjuring her so frequently in his mind, of causing her to manifest in his loneliest hours like a projection he would watch with toxic sentimentality. She was never real, but never had she been so complete as she was there on the sand. And he could not imagine differences. There was a shadow on her left shoulder, a slight indentation that had not been there before. It was a like a vein in marble that scrawled itself in a gray line across an unmarred surface.

He could not imagine motions and angles he had not seen. She breathed in the sea air, deep into her lungs as the muscles of her back lengthened. He had not seen her breathe that way, from a position behind and above, or while she hunched into herself. She was real, and he could not comprehend that. He remained frozen in body and a thrashing, tumultuous storm in mind.

She sighed again, and pressing her palms against the sand by her sides, untangled her legs. There was her ankle. If any doubt remained of her corporeal presence, he would know by that ankle that she really stood so close he could call to her without shouting.

She rose as the tide licked at her sandal-covered feet, brushing herself free of debris. He thought her long skirt was the same. She probably still owned only the one, and he wondered why she would wear it when she hated skirts. He could not stop himself from venturing there.

She stared at the sea for many moments more, and then she turned toward his studio with toes buried in sand and shoulders sloping downward. She did not look up. She moved slowly with the breeze behind her, cast half in shadow and half in light. The damp sand made imprints of her steps, the slap of her sandals a sharp interruption to the quiet hum of night. He followed her path clearly from his aerie above.

She stopped. Palms strewn along the path between the beach and structures eased the wind’s effect on her hair and cloth. She was stillness and silence. She was real.

She lifted her gaze to the door of his studio. He’d kept a dim incandescent light on in his apartment. It bathed the balcony in a thin yellow glow. He thought it’s lure must be the reason she looked up, because the idea of her knowing he stood there and sensing him somehow was too painful to consider, though he wished it more than anything. Almost.

He knew exactly when she saw him. Her body had been reluctant but not tense, yet now, every muscle corded in readiness, her fingers tightened into fists at her sides, her lips twisted downward not in fury, but in pain. He knew the difference. Her eyes were swords piercing the air between them.

She was tall and splendid. She looked the same and didn’t look the same. Her body was still large, often unwieldy when she didn’t know what to do with it, a flowing living painting of grace when she did. Her left cheek had a new shadow, too, like her arm. Her beautiful eyes were settled on his face, glowing, radiant, magnetic as always. His memory had failed him in assembling those eyes. He did not know the expression he wore. He knew it was not soft.

Her blush burgeoned and burned across her milk-white skin. He was unprepared for its consequence. It made him hard. It made him yearn. It broke his dread over her reality, for her blush was its own living being. Never the same shape, never taking the same path. He breathed deeply of the clean air, and he stared at her. He allowed himself to conclude the vigil of his waiting, and in doing so, the locked vault in his mind which contained all those agonizing things the time away from her had built, was opened, those pains set free.

He did not know how long they stood, whether it was seconds, minutes, weeks. Time had been given, and now it bore no relevance. He was going to speak. He was going to say something to her about his relief, or her beauty, or possibly only _hello_.

“I’m sorry,” she said, so softly it might have been the breeze.

She could mean so many things. She could be telling him she was leaving, or that she was sorry for leaving him. That she took so long, that she wore an old skirt. He lifted one shoulder very slightly in a mockery of a shrug. His body felt heavy as lead. He smiled a little, thought he did at least.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said.

That too, could mean many things, and he hadn’t decided because he spoke truth. It didn’t matter that she had left or taken her time, or that she was sorry at all. It only mattered that she stayed.

She was silent, her lips parted and plush and bitten red. He wanted them.

He swallowed and was dismayed to hear his own voice so weak and pleading. “If I come down to open the door, will you still be here?”

She took more time. He was beginning to begrudge her it, when she nodded. He stepped cautiously backward, into his apartment, and did not turn until he could no longer see her. He rushed across the space and down the unlit stairs, back across a slippery, dusty floor until he flung the door open. He did not breathe until he was assured that she had not moved.

His fingers found the switch near the door, and he flicked a dim light on without moving his gaze from her. He took a step back.

“Come here,” he said, so afraid she would not comply. If she ran again, he would not have strength to let her be. He would demean himself and beg for her presence. It would be an ugly, desperate thing.

She took a step, and it was toward him and not away, and he could weep from it if he were not so consumed by her face drawing ever closer. Yet they did not touch. He was not yet prepared despite his want. He suspected she felt the same.

She blinked too fast and would not look at him.

He could not help it. He had to know, because he was only beginning to remember why he had lost track of her, he had to know where she had been. Her pose was manifest anguish. She had suffered, more and differently. She had become withdrawn.

He tried to begin, but it was so difficult to shape his lasting terror into words. “I…I know about Bayasabhad.”

Her gaze snapped up, the blue piercing straight into his soul, and she was not angry. It was despair. “I know.” She stepped closer, so close her breath warmed his face. “Tell me what you see,” she demanded.

He allowed himself to drink her, to _see_ her and freshly paint her in his mind though he had no intention of ever being deprived of her reality again. He saw all he had seen from the balcony, removed from shadow and free of meddling wind. He saw a wound. He fixed on it, tracing with his eyes a bone-deep jagged canyon of pure white scar, remnants of angry scarlet surrounding it. It was a horrifying thing to observe. It made him feel consumed by a violence he had not known lay dormant within him.

He remained a monument of calm, for his own sake as much as hers. He shifted his gaze to the soothing balm of her eyes. “What happened?”

She grimaced. It was pure pain. “A man bit me.”

He knew it was in Bayasabhad. She had been caught in the violence as he had so desperately feared. He hid his shaking hand behind his back. “Is he dead?”

She nodded. Dew began to collect in the corners of her eyes. “A boy killed him, or I would have been forced to do it myself. He was just a boy, not even a young man.”

Jaime wanted to reach for her, but he was not yet able to subdue the terrible tension in his body. “Is he dead?”

A thin trickle of water began to leave a glimmering trail down her cheek. She shook her head. “No, thank the gods. I…I don’t know what I would have done.”

“Where were you?” he blurted, breaths uneven and as shaky as his hand.

He could see that she understood. Her eyes were so brimmed with pain, and he did not know how to stop it. She whispered, “Jaime, tell me what you see.”

He knew what she wanted. That he explain how her face had changed, how she was ugly and now uglier, how she was damaged. How he could not look at her without cringing. How he would not feel those now-old and likely confused drunken sentiments for her. How she could be free to remove herself and sink into some exile of pity, as she so clearly did not deserve to be desired.

He felt the storm within him begin to recede. He unclenched his fist and dropped his arm to his side, swallowed the dust of rage away. He would answer her with doubtless truth, in words and in craft.

He reached for her hand as it rested limply by her hip. He twined his fingers with hers and did not ask her to follow as he turned and moved to the end of the studio. She had no choice but to come with him, though he noticed no drag in her steps.

He did not want to let go her hand, but damn that he had only one. He quickly dragged the blue cloth from her block of stone, and then lowered the swath concealing the surface near the bottom.

He heard her sharp breath, watched as she moved forward and lowered herself to look upon the marble. His eyes followed the shape of her fingers as they rose to feel the work he had done so painstakingly.

It was not wonderful, not close to what he once could have done, but it was smooth and lovely. He knew that. It was not formed of the frantic madness he employed to create his other works now.

“How have you done this?” she breathed, her eyes glowing, her lips open.

He glanced only for a moment at the stone. He had freed one small portion of her from the marble, one small glimpse of muse merged into woman. It was her left leg, from knee to toes buried in sand, her ankle just as the convergence of color in the stone had first shown him, as he had shown to her. A hand was wrapped around her leg, his hand, fingers digging into flesh, though softly and with marveled tribute rather than pain.

“I…I did better,” he said in mimicry of her past words.

“It’s your hand,” she said more to herself than to him.

“What good is it if I’m not with you?” he said, low and breathy.

She looked up at him, she rose with her fingers trailing along the stone and remaining there. “What will the rest be?”

He stared at her lips. “There is no rest. It’s complete.”

Her brow furrowed. “But you can do what you love again.”

He stared at her eyes. “I can, I will. But not that. It’s done. They are in the stone together.”

He wanted to run his thumb over the dampness on her cheek, the smooth plane and the ruined brutality. She seemed to want to say something but could not find the words.

“I was too much for you,” he said so gently.

She did not object because it was true. “I was not enough for you,” she said.

He did lift his hand then, rested it on her cheek and felt her warmth and her substance at last seep into his skin. He wanted to be angry with her claim, but it was nothing and falsehood and unworthy. “I have never once believed that.”

She looked at him. “I said _was_.”

He blinked, not expecting her reply, not expecting any sense of confidence, but he could not deny the determination of her tone.

“Read the words,” she demanded.

He furrowed his brow, lost in her eyes and the feel of her skin, and the confusion of her words.

She looked over at the work in the middle of the space, the broken man he had made for her. “I saw it,” she said. “You wanted me to, I know that. I saw it in a magazine, and then I went to see it in the museum.”

He swallowed. She had not buried him in her thoughts all this time. He had done something right in this work.

“Read the words,” she repeated.

The broken man had wholly been his message to her, his hope and his despair, his knowing of her fear and her heart. He had given her words through the stone lips.

He did not look at her. “I drown not in the sea, I carve not in stone but in myself, I love no muse but woman’s soul.”

Her hand rose to cover his. He was surrounded by her, consumed by her. He met her gaze. “You have asked what I see, and I see who I love.”

He did not know when her hand came to rest on his shoulder, when his aching stump found the small of her back, when he found her lips or she found his. It was the crash of sea against rock. It was gentle adulation, it was greedy flesh, desperate claiming, tangled limbs. He could not breathe, he did not care. He followed the only path he ever had with lips and tongue. Her mouth, her cheek, her jaw, her neck, the flavor of her skin the greatest pleasure he yet had known.

She muttered words into the heated air near his ear. He lifted his head, but did not part his lips from her body.

“I love you,” she said, “I love you.”

He froze. He stared, at her mouth, her blush, her eyes. He stared in terror that he had been dreaming all the while. That he had gone mad, that she was lying, that she herself was a lie. He saw only frightened truth. She nodded so slightly he barely felt the motion beneath his shaking hand.

“Stay,” he said, pleaded.

She did not nod, she did not speak. She pressed her body against his, turned them both until she rested against her block of stone. She found his lips with hers and lifted her foot until her thigh grazed along his hip.

 

Fin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and so it ends. 
> 
> Lol, snortle, Ned you rapscallion!
> 
> Thank you all for reading and commenting, and cheering me on during my manic middle-of-the-night WRITE THE CHAPTER YOU BITCH sessions of madness. This has been a trippy writing experiment. Mikki, as always, you are Sensei. My blocking would suck without you! Sandwiches, you are just like a huge platter of colorful French macarons that gets delivered to my door unexpectedly, and then I open the ribbon-wrapped box with glee, and that's a thing.
> 
> Plus...they didn't die! Told ya! I don't kill them, or leave them separated in wallowing despair. I do NOT, so never fear, because I am a fluffy sap.


End file.
